


Starman

by LaCidiana



Category: Doctor Who, Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Annie Contends with an All-Star Team of Profoundly Damaged Men, Can't Catch Gene Gay Thoughts, Crossover, F/M, Gen, Identity Porn, Let's Torture Sam Tyler Beyond the Realm of Reason, Long, M/M, Pre-Slash, Psychological Drama, The Doctor Ruins Everything He Touches
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-18
Updated: 2015-09-18
Packaged: 2018-04-21 01:49:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 46,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4810316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaCidiana/pseuds/LaCidiana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Wonder how a bloke gets like that. Being a monster."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Cover

**Author's Note:**

> **Edit:** Here, there's an fic soundtrack too! ~~Because I'm insane!~~ [Masterly - Life on Mars / Doctor Who FST](http://hughes.dreamwidth.org/245266.html)
> 
>  **Acknowledgements** : Thanks from the bottom of my heart to everyone who has beta'd this wall of text over the years and helped with brainstorming and concrit along the way: [Court](http://mustang.tumblr.com), [Kristin](http://arcanewinter.tumblr.com), [Mina](http://inouken.tumblr.com), [Margo](http://margotkim.tumblr.com), and last but not least, Sky, who along with Britpicking, also urged me to post what I have of this behemoth instead of letting it sit on my hard drive forever.
> 
> And thank you to the countless others who have offered words of support through Tumblr posts, Chatango talks, and any other social media exchanges. I really can't thank all of you enough. ♥
> 
>  **Disclaimers:** I was BORRNNN IN THE USA... which means stray Americanisms and horrible inaccuracies may very well pop up as a result of my final edits and despite Sky's Britpicking efforts. I also consciously kept American punctuation/spelling in an effort to stay sane as I made revisions to this thing later down the line, so I apologize if that adds an extra distraction while reading. 8(
> 
>  **Continuity:** Diverges from Life on Mars canon sometime after Ep.206 (the one where Sam meets Maya's mom and Gene angsts abut his brother). Diverges from Doctor Who canon with the extremely popular "Lucy didn't shoot the Master nosiree" trope.
> 
> This fic also takes place in a Life on Mars AU where everything is exactly the same except the Doctor Who franchise doesn't exist.

  



	2. I: Iron Man | o

o.

\---

In 2008, a man waited by the Thames.

He leaned on a railing and looked out at the river, at reflected lights and fluoresced flashes, old lamps faded from glory and refurbished with neon splendor. A brilliant wheel turned slowly in the distance, rising out of the skyline like a second moon.

He remembered the day the wheel had been finished and he remembered the day it would be destroyed. Bars of steel and nuts and bolts, discarded and rusting, crumbling, falling away to shadows and dust.

It was strange, he thought, how much could change over time -- a little time, some years, a fraction of a cosmic moment in the suffocating vastness of infinity. It was strange how much that moment could matter, how the loss of something within it could turn a man, could tear him apart at the seams.

Could make him feel like a ghost, long gone.


	3. I: Iron Man | i

i.

_has he lost his mind_   
_can he see or is he blind_   
_can he walk and talk_   
_or if he moves will he fall_

\---

"Wonder how a bloke gets like that. Being a monster."

Sam glanced up from his notebook. Gene's shoulders were squared, fingers idle on the neck of his flask. He looked like he'd gone three rounds with the Sandman and lost the privilege of sleeping for a week.

Sam knelt down and scanned the flat's carpet, once light tan and now stained dirt-colored red. Blood spatter soaked through the wallpaper nearby, peeling the edges as it dried. "We don't know if this murderer is a bloke, Guv. Might not even appear especially monstrous."

Gene snorted. "Who did this, then -- an enthusiastic butcher?"

Sam's eyes flicked over the carpet, from spots of red to a clump of hair to a tooth lodged somewhere in the rug fibers. He swallowed, pressed his pencil to paper and went on with routine. "I can't pretend to know what goes on in a lunatic mind."

"You can't pretend to know what goes on in bloody general." Gene took a swig from his flask, then capped it. "Fact in point, your nancy forensics have been 'bout as useful as tits on Clark Gable last three crime scenes."

"Killer cleans up well." Sam scowled inadequately.

"If you call this 'cleaning up,' I've a notion why your flat's modeled on a particularly gloomy portion of the Gulag."

Sam rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, then let his gaze wander the length of the room, resting on the other detectives in turn, faces collectively haggard, mouths dry and slack. They hadn't looked this bleak since the Lamb ransom fiasco some weeks ago, and they hadn't even been the ones suffering a bloody drug overdose at the time.

Sam sighed. "Cleans up anything useful," he amended.

"So what the hell does he want, then?" Gene muttered in response, voice taut, fist clenched. "Page in the paper? A sleep-deprived department?"

"Fava beans and a nice chianti," Sam offered with a small groan of exhaustion. He ran a hand down his face as he stood from the floor. "Some twisted sense of purpose. A bastard friend. Who bloody knows."

Gene jabbed him in the shoulder. "So keep the plods on task 'till you've a better ruddy answer. Meanwhile, I'm off."

Sam scoffed. "Quite a time for a breather."

Gene straightened his lapels. "You can blame your own for this one. Call came in, few minutes ago. Seems I'm back to CID on account of one of your mates."

Sam frowned. "Mates?"

"Yes, Tyler -- mates. Something you'd know about if you weren't so bloody irritating." Gene turned to the door as he clarified. "Some bastard from Hyde, tossin' about papers and saying he's been lent to the case. Already a brilliant waste of my time."

Sam's hands tensed -- Hyde -- but he swallowed it down, and nodded, and crossed his arms over his chest. "Right, and while you're gone, I expect I'll be conveniently burdened with addressing the media frenzy."

Gene waved over his shoulder. "You play the bastard self-martyr. Be one."

\---

Sam wasn't sure what disgusted him more -- the violent hedonism of the murders or the glee with which the papers embraced them. Or maybe Gene's willful obliviousness to any professional propriety in handling either -- last time the Guv had addressed the public on the matter, he'd coined the nickname "Manchester Mangler," which had regrettably stuck.

Now, with the murmur of reporters and photographers finally dissipating from outside the building, the crime scene lay in front of Sam in eerie, tangible silence. Most of CID's members had retreated back to the station, and the few that remained had desensitized enough to the spectacle to go about their business, but not enough to do it with conversation. Perhaps that meant they were treating this crime with a little more sensitivity and a little less macho attitude, or maybe trepidation occurred even in the Guv's men when faced with the reality of a four-victim body count.

God. Four. This time, it'd been a woman -- Sarah Wellington, no more than twenty-three -- but the first had been Harold Free, an old man in Trafford, the second a schoolboy -- not seven years old, the third a middle-aged clothier, all gone missing and presumed dead from scenes awash with blood. No apparent motive, and aside from the similar states of the crime scenes, no pattern in location or identity. They were clean jobs under a messy guise, bits of flesh scattered with all the deliberate theatricality of rose petals -- and so far they'd offered no witnesses, no fingerprints, and not a single actual body. Just gruesome bloodbaths and a citizen gone missing once a week.

The calls were mounting, the tones were rising. No one in the station had gotten much sleep the past couple of weeks, because what Gene had said was true -- this killer was a monster. No one knew what he'd do next.

_Rrrrriiing._

Sam turned toward the phone on the kitchenette counter.

It rang again.

Sam looked around, as he normally did -- as he normally had to do in this fantastic delusion he called everyday life. No response from Annie, gently nudging through the closet, or Chris, rifling through a chest of drawers.

Sam took several cautious steps and picked up the receiver. He braced himself for the soft hiss of a breathing tube, the beep of a heart monitor, but instead--

"Don't stay inside."

The voice was low. Unfamiliar. Sam's stomach clenched.

"What?"

"He'll tell you to stay inside. Don't."

It clicked to silence.

"Boss--"

Sam dropped the receiver, then turned. He tried to focus on the rattled expression on Chris' face rather than his own, tried to look like a trained professional and not a lost bloody castaway.

"Yeah?" Sam said.

"Uh, stuff I found in the dresser." Chris offered an evidence bag. His Adam's apple bobbed as his eyes took an erratic sweep of the room.

Sam took the plastic bag and thumbed through its contents from the outside, regaining composure with each object. Pack of gum, a compact mirror, and an old lighter.

"Any obvious prints on these?" Sam flipped the bag in his hand and studied it.

Chris looked back to Sam with a start. "What? Oh. Dunno."

Sam twisted his mouth. "Chris, it's our job to keep our heads about us, regardless of circumstances. For the sake of the public."

Chris shifted his weight and looked at the floor. "I know, Boss. Jus'... bad week, s'all. Personal-like."

Sam's expression tightened.

"Trust me, Chris. It could be worse."

"870, come in. DI Tyler, do you read?"

Sam juggled the bag into his other hand and reached under his jacket for his radio. Annie approached in his peripheral vision, holding a cardboard box.

"Alpha One," Sam responded, "this is 870, over."

"Guv's callin' you to station. Says to stop slave-drivin' the others and let 'em out to pub. Over."

Sam rolled his eyes at what he could only hope was Gene's attempt at irony. "Right, Phyllis. Over and out."

Normally, a smattering of applause might arise from the plods on scene after hearing the exchange, but in the morbid atmosphere, Sam was spared the slight humiliation. Instead, Annie cleared her throat, drawing his attention to her box of collected clothes.

"S'all I found in the closet." She offered him a glimpse of coats, skirts, a manky scarf, and then shrugged in her self-conscious way. "Don't know if it's any help."

Sam smiled with weary honesty. "You never know what could make or break a case." God knew that if someone could recognize the value of a thorough investigation under these circumstances, it was Annie, but with 70's chauvinism as rampant and disgusting as venereal disease, the chances of her getting out of collator duty were close to nil. Although...

She blinked at him. "What is it?"

"We could use some insight on this killer. Find a pattern." Sam glanced at the bulk of the blood puddle and winced. "Forensics aren't getting us much, and with the Guv at an impasse, maybe he'll finally accept some alternative leads -- profiling."

"Profiling." Annie shifted the box in her arms. "You mean writing up a report? Getting a look in the killer's head, like?"

Sam's brow creased. "Not a pleasant job, I know."

"I didn't think a WDC's job was supposed to be pleasant." Annie tilted her chin and smiled.

Sam paused, then returned a small smile of his own. "Right. You're right." He cleared his throat and took a step toward the box. "Do you need help--"

"I've got it, sir." She stepped backward, smile waning, then walked toward the door.

Sam watched her go. He turned and got an eyeful of Chris, still standing idle, looking off with strange melancholy.

Sam scowled and shoved the bag of evidence into Chris' chest. "Tag these in the logs and hand them to forensics before you finish tonight."

Chris' faraway expression fell into something more like mundane disappointment. "But, Boss--"

"For the sake of the public," Sam countered.

Chris sighed and pressed his fingers into the plastic. "Right, Boss. Sake of the public."

\---

It was late by the time Sam made it back to the station. Cold, too, and not just because he'd spent the last few hours watching the coroner tweeze up bits of anatomy from a crusted carpet. The sharper bite of winter had started to roll in over the city's usual chill, and the sky afforded little light save for pinprick stars, blurred and glowing faintly above Manchester's hazy veil.

CID wasn't much warmer. Neither was the Guv's greeting, terse and immediate as Sam pushed open the door to his office. "'Bout time you buggered on over."

Sam glanced from Gene to the tall, lanky bloke sitting across from him. Gene waved his hand in a gesture that bordered between introductory and dismissive.

"DI Tyler, meet DI Smith. From C-Division."

The man turned in his seat to grin at Sam.

He looked a bit odd, Sam thought immediately -- all big teeth and gawky angles, wrapped up in an over-tailored suit. But before Sam could take any further stock of the man, he leapt up, hand outstretched.

"John Smith," he said. When Sam took his hand, the man returned the motion with a tighter grip than he was prepared for. "Sam Tyler, I've looked forward to meeting _you_."

"You have?" Sam glanced over his shoulder at Gene, and for a brief, surreal moment, they shared the same _"What's he on about?"_ look, followed swiftly by a roll of Gene's eyes to denote, _"You tell me; he's from your Hyde brood."_

Smith grinned even wider. "Of course! Catching robbers, saving hostages, bringing gangsters and drug lords to timely and, ah, legal justice..."

Smith must've heard about A-Division's exploits up to the recent heroin deaths, though it was hard for Sam to put the whole affair into context without remembering Maya's painful farewells alongside it.

"Dunno 'bout Hyde," Gene broke in, with the peculiar contemptuousness he reserved for the word, "but 'round here, catching villains is what we do."

"Yes, well." Smith, unfettered and still handshaking, clasped his free hand to Sam's shoulder. "Nothing wrong with congratulating a man for being the best he can possibly be."

Smith stared at Sam, his eyes big, wide, open.

Sam cleared his throat and tugged his hand away. "We try," he said about as diplomatically as he could without Gene calling them a couple of poofters.

"Oh, aye, try." Gene leaned back in his chair. "Must be why you haven't a sodding clue who the Mangler's hitting next."

"The killer," Sam muttered.

"Same bloody thing."

"Yes. Bloody." Smith whirled around and tapped his chin. "There's rather a lot of that on the scenes, isn't there? Blood, I mean. But no bodies."

"So you've noticed," Gene shot back, "along with every paper this side of Liverpool."

Sam crossed his arms. "You'll have to excuse DCI Hunt. He gets a bit tetchy when there's a new gunslinger in town."

"Only if they ride in arse-backwards." After a moment, Gene stood from his desk and grabbed his camelhair from the rack nearby. "But seeing as I'm 'excused,' I'll be off for me evenin' social. If you Hyde boys care to join, I suggest you do it before I'm deaf in both ears from facts I already know."

Sam's brow furrowed. "We have a serial killer on the loose. I'm not quite sure a night of drinks--"

"Do you get off on everyone in this station looking like their mum's up and died?" Gene shrugged on his coat and cricked his neck. "Poor sods have been working this two days straight. Mangler hits once every week like clockwork, and right now, it's been six sodding hours."

Expect Gene to make insinuations of shoddy police work and then become a sordid example of it. Sam clenched his fists. "We should be setting a standard--"

"Could do both."

Smith shifted his weight from foot to foot. When he noticed Sam and Gene staring, he beamed.

\---

By the second case file, Sam had decided DI Smith wasn't a bad bloke to drink with, and by the fourth pint, so had everyone else.

"Nice meetin' you, Mr. DI, sir!" Chris had exclaimed as he'd stumbled for the door, but for the most part since the card games had started, Sam and Smith had been left alone in the Arms' corner booth to pore over the leads.

"So, this Mangler," Smith started.

"Killer," Sam corrected.

"This killer doesn't leave a trace? None at all? Hairs, dirt, fingernails, footprints, particles of any sort?"

Sam ran a hand down his face. His mind flashed briefly to DNA, NAFIS, god-damned Google Earth.

"None that our... limited technology can gather, no."

Sam expected to earn a pause or glance with his uncensored temporal frustration, but instead, Smith leaned away from the file and splayed his hand on the table.

"That's peculiar. Very peculiar, for something this... messy."

Sam frowned and took a draught from his bitter as he studied this man from Hyde. Smith was the peculiar one, as far as he was concerned, and Sam could only suppose it was his own long-running madness that had blinded everyone else from noticing. The pinstripe suit and fitted overcoat weren't poncy enough to land Smith in Litton's league, but they did seem... off, somehow. Something about the swirl-patterned tie shimmered too brightly; the stripes in his suitjacket lined up too perfectly. Smith's hair stood up like it'd been electrocuted or gelled, and Sam wondered if the latter was even in style this decade.

And then there were the shoes, which Sam had first noticed from the lack of clicks against the station's hard floors. Rubber-soled. Bloody Converse, in fact. Had those been invented yet?

But all of these, at least, Sam could chalk up to his own escalating delusions or paranoia thereof. What he truly couldn't shake from his mind was--

"That accent of yours. Not from 'round here, originally?"

Smith glanced up, pulled a face, looked back down. "No, suppose not."

Sam tapped his glass with a finger. "How'd you end up at Hyde, then?"

Smith paused, then stretched arms behind his head. "Oh, you know, this and that. I've traveled a bit -- ended up here."

"Here. Manchester, 1973?"

"Why not?" Smith regarded him mildly.

Sam's lips quirked with pathetic, personal humor. "I could think of a few reasons."

He allowed his eyes to wander across figures in the bar who might or might not have been included in those reasons, ending with a requisite few seconds on Ray. The great idiot's gambling pile had dwindled from 50 p to 20.

Sam couldn't help a small smirk. He looked back to Smith, intending to point out this very example, but paused when he caught Smith's eyes fixed somewhere on the table. Sam followed Smith's gaze to find his own hand, clasping his drink.

"Your finger," Smith said.

Sam realized he was tapping a nervous rhythm against the glass. He stopped and glanced up, a little confused, a little drunk.

"Sorry, mate. Didn't mean to bother."

From this angle, head canted and features cast in shadow under the pub's dim light, Smith looked almost painfully tired. Alone.

Then he smiled and leaned forward to grip his drink. "S'bit nice, actually."

\---

Sam was willing to concede, by the time he stumbled into his horrible flat, that Gene might have been right about winding down at the pub.

Or maybe that was the last scotch talking. Or the last few days working more hours than not, or bits and pieces of four missing victims on four cold mortuary trays. After all, Sam wasn't drunk, exactly -- just a little unsteady on his feet and knackered to hell, enough that when he fell onto his saggy bed and rested his eyes a moment, he failed to notice the empty test card glowing from his television set.

"You want so much, Sam."

His eyes snapped open.

"It must be hard, to want so much."

He wrenched himself up on one elbow, stiffened his jaw to silence. Her red dress glowed from the shadows.

Sam swallowed. "I just want to go home."

"You can't do that, silly." She skipped in place. Her feet hit the carpet in little pitter-patters. "It's gone, gone, ashes, we all fall down!"

Sam heard a blast, and then silence, a void, overwhelming isolation. He shook in it, choked on it. Her red dress floated toward him.

"You left them. You got scared and you left them, but I understand. I'll even help you, Sam. I'll tell you a secret."

A murky ocean weighed on his shoulders. He struggled to raise his eyes, but his body protested, heavy and nauseous. A small hand gripped his chin like a vice and pulled his gaze up inch by inch. Her smile overtook his sight, wide and powerful.

"All in your head."

Sam closed his eyes and shuddered. She lowered her voice.

"Can't you hear it, Sam?"

"I don't know," he mumbled to the air, "I don't--"

"It's all in your head," she sang, tone rising and falling to rhythm, "all in your head, all in your head, _all in your head._ "

_What you really need is a doctor._

Gasp, clutch, _breathe._

Sweat on his hands, metal on his tongue, razor-sharp air through his nostrils. His heart jackhammered in his chest like a panicked animal and he had too much blood to pump -- he was going to die, he was surely going to _die_.

His fingers tangled tight in clammy sheets, cold and shaking. For several seconds he fell straight through the mattress, through time, into darkness, a chasm beyond depth. He shut his eyes and bore out the vertigo like a man tied to a mast, frightened and helpless and held captive far from home.

\---

"Sam?"

He raised his head, fingers idle against the edge of a witness statement. For a moment, all he registered was her face. Wide blue eyes, creased brow, mouth drawn tight in concern.

"Are you all right?"

"Oh." Sam rubbed his temple. The station's sounds came back into focus -- typewriters, papers, footsteps. "Yeah. Sorry. Long night."

Annie smiled as she smoothed down her skirt and settled into the chair next to his desk. "I heard. Must have been nice, yeah?"

Sam stared back at her, attempting to reconcile her words with the previous night's horror. She clarified, gently, "Seeing someone from C-Division, I mean."

Something clicked. Sam's shoulders relaxed. "You mean Smith."

Annie laughed. "'Course I mean him. Come on now, what's he like?"

"What do you mean?"

"Some of the WPCs were saying he wasn't... well. Bad looking, let's say." Annie smiled in her small, disarming manner and leaned toward Sam, conspiratorial. "He came by the station this morning, but I didn't see him -- went out to chase a lead, the Guv says." She paused. "I don't think he likes him much."

Sam let out his first real laugh of the day. "The Guv doesn't like anyone, least of all blokes from Hyde."

He knew he'd made a mistake as soon as Annie's face brightened, as she leaned back in the chair and folded her hands in her lap. "Right, then, from Hyde. So you do know him."

Sam felt a wave of self-awareness -- of looking like a dead man walking. Dark eyes, ashen face, meandering movements, and... Christ, he always looked like a dead man, and with that momentum, he finally said, "I don't remember him, Annie. I don't remember anything from Hyde. You know that."

Annie did know, but she deflated all the same. She averted her gaze in that small, awful way that told Sam this world had deprived him another friendly conversation for the privilege of confiding in one single bloody person.

"He doesn't seem to know me either," Sam murmured by way of apology. He shifted in his seat, grasped a pencil and did nothing with it. "Not personally, anyway. Must've transferred in after I... allegedly left."

Annie raised her head again. "Transferred? From where?"

Sam shrugged. "London, I'd say."

"You don't know?"

Something in her voice made Sam's fingers tense. "Haven't checked yet."

"Haven't checked?" Annie set her feet flat against the ground and leaned forward, imploring. "Why not, Sam? He might be able to help you, if he's from Hyde--"

"Exactly. Hyde. What would it bloody matter where he came from before?"

His voice came out sharp, mean. He pursed his lips in the wake of it, exhausted, frustrated. He couldn't bother to correct himself.

Annie narrowed her eyes. "Right. Suppose if you found anything, might make things too real."

The last words came out thin, angry, as her mouth tightened into a line. Sam opened his mouth, but she shook her head, stood up, and marched back to her desk.

"Annie--" Sam got out, stuck in his throat until a moment too late. He lowered his head back to his papers and caught the small smirk Ray gave from his desk. He'd lost the rest of his 20 p last night, but Sam expected now he felt a bit better.

Good. Good for Ray, because Sam right well bloody didn't.

"All right, gents!"

The Guv's office door slammed open as his voice broke through the room with its comfortable authority. Sam turned to see him shrug on his coat as Chris trailed behind him. "DC Skelton's found us a lead -- told you the week would take a turn, Christopher."

Sam jumped to his feet, eager to get out of the station. "What kind of lead?"

"This'un, Boss," Chris grinned as he proffered a small pamphlet, sealed -- thankfully -- in an evidence bag. Sam took it and squinted at the front advert.

"Camille Lupei? Fortune-teller extraordinaire?"

"Turn it over," Gene grunted.

Sam did, and paused. Two drops of blood, smudged on one corner.

He looked to Chris. "Where'd you find this?"

Chris crossed his arms, wearing a satisfied smile. "'Ad a hunch. Like one of the Guv's," he credited, nodding to Gene. "Back panel o'the dresser on the last scene seemed loose -- stopped by this mornin', gave it a whack, this fell to the ground. Must've been stuck behind it."

His grin widened, and he looked to Sam with unparalleled pride. "For the sake of the public, yeah?"

Sam raised a brow, then flipped the pamphlet back to its front. He considered -- and scowled. He looked up and wagged it at Gene and Chris.

"If this was left over from the crime, why was it deliberately tucked away?"

Chris' expression faltered. He fiddled with something in his pocket. "Dunno, Boss. S'where I found that... bag. Evidence in the bag, I mean. Put into the bag--"

"Dammit, man, it's a clue, innit?" Gene snatched the pamphlet back, then stormed toward the hall. "Chris' hunch paid off, or does he have to be a pureblood Tyler saint 'stead of a ruddy bastard 'tween the two of us?"

"Wh--" Sam stuttered for a moment, then shook his head -- hard -- and followed. "Seems awfully convenient, is all -- a piece of paper that happens to have some blood and an address?"

Gene slammed his hand down on the lift call button. "Right, I forgot -- in your world, everything has to be bloody difficult."

_Your world._

Sam winced. "Just... let's not jump to conclusions, Guv."

Gene scoffed as the lift whirred. "You're the one assuming I'd bang someone up over a sodding pamphlet."

"Wouldn't you?"

The lift dinged. Gene stepped inside.

"I'd have to have reason, now, wouldn't I? For instance--" he whirled on Sam, furious, " _\--blood on the damn thing_. Now get in here!"

Sam grit his teeth and stepped into the lift. He hit the button for the ground floor and turned around to face the hallway as the doors slid shut.

"Percy Lane."

Sam looked to Gene, to the hard line of his expression as he gazed down at the pamphlet's address line.

Sam frowned. "What about it?"

Gene didn't answer a moment. Then he shrugged and pocketed the thing.

"Utter shit-hole."

\---

Sam squinted at the row of run-down flats through the Cortina's windscreen as he contemplated the truth of Gene's statement. The lopsided brick buildings looked like they'd be bulldozed to the ground if subject to 2006's safety standards, and the grey sky conspired to make the half-boarded windows even dingier, misting up the grime-covered glass panes and soaking into their rotted mullions.

"If that fortune teller knew owt of the bloody future, she wouldn't be living here."

He glanced over at the driver's seat, where Gene was nursing a cigarette.

Sam curled his hand around the door handle. "It's not about knowing the future -- it's about knowing people. Telling them what they want to hear."

Gene remained silent. His cigarette embers glowed in the darkness of the Cortina's interior, tempered by smoke to give his eyes a peculiar smolder.

Sam frowned at him. "Guv--"

"D'you know something rhetorical when you hear it or are you that determined to sound a wanker?"

Gene shoved out of the Cortina and walked down the street. Sam paused, then exited the car.

"You're the one with all your 'hunches'," he said as he shut the door. "Isn't that psychic superstition?"

Gene flicked his cigarette into a nearby puddle. "Nope. Magic. Gene Genie, remember?"

Sam caught up with him on the pavement. "Then tell me what possible connection a petty swindler could have to a systematic psychopath."

"Mangler's a lunatic monster, Tyler." Gene adjusted his collar against the cold. "Can't get more senseless than that."

Sam scowled. He looked off and intoned the question that had nagged him ever since this entire mess had begun. "Thing is, all serial killers have a reason for choosing each victim, even if it only makes sense in their mind. Where's the pattern here?"

Gene raised his eyes to the sky. "Oh, lovely, now he learns what 'rhetorical' means."

"I still say the advert's a plant," Sam muttered as he searched his jacket for his notepad. "Too easy."

"And I say we're already looking into it, so stop whinging and keep walking." Gene glared at a couple of children kicking a ball down the street. "'Sides, gypsies are into that kind of twisted bollocks, aren't they?"

Oh, god. Sam winced. "What 'twisted bollocks,' exactly...?"

"Voodoo, sacrifice," Gene offered absently, glancing at a derelict police box, "smearing blood on walls, good fun."

Sam stared at him. "I think you're mixing up your stereotypes, Guv." He scowled. "Is that what this is about, then? Pinning the crime on the nearest minority?"

Gene turned to reinstall the full weight of his glare on Sam. "It's about pinning the crime on the nearest serial killer, or are they one of your nancy causes now too?"

This line of inquiry had fast become futile. Instead of replying, Sam stopped and flipped his notebook open, checked his handwriting. He frowned up at the brick-decayed mess towering over them. "I think this is the address."

Gene stopped next to him. For a moment, he stood there, hands stuffed in his pockets, breath misting in the cold.

His mouth twisted. He marched up the front step and ripped a faded paper sign off the door.

"Bloody disgrace." He turned and waved the paper's lettering at Sam -- something Romanian. "You'd never know this once was a proper English street!"

"I was unaware the country borders had been redrawn," Sam replied, deadpan.

"Oh, aye." Gene crumpled up the paper and tossed it. "Right now you're standing on the boundary of Smart-arse-landia and the Republic of Shut Up and Get Over Here."

Sam scowled and pocketed his notepad. He walked up to the door beside Gene and raised his hand to knock on it when a crash and a bang hit the air.

Sam's head snapped toward Gene. They both looked back to the entrance.

Their feet came down on the door and smashed it off its hinges.

"Police!" Gene shouted as they took quick steps into the building, rotting floorboards creaking underfoot. A screech rang out, followed soon by a crack and a strange, low buzzing noise.

Sam grit his teeth and rushed forward, heart pumping as he rounded a corner to an open door that allowed him a chaotic view of the flat within: a wood table turned over a manky oriental rug, scattered stuffing from a misshapen armchair, and crystal ball shards, littering the dank room like iridescent leaves. Gene dodged inside and opted to take the nearest door further into the flat. Sam grit his teeth and followed--

Into a bedroom brighter and cooler than the others through virtue of its shattered window. Curtains stirred with the slight breeze, and Sam's attention snapped to the figure they obscured.

"Oi!" Gene shouldered past Sam to face the suspect. "Hands up, blades down!"

The figure jolted, then spun around.

Sam froze. "DI Smith?"

"Right, that's me! Hello, Sam!" Smith grinned at him, rather inappropriately, Sam thought, given both the disheveled state of his suit and the dangerous step Gene took toward him.

"Lead paid off, I take it." Gene raised his chin an inch.

"Yes. Well. Ran off, more like it, but..." Smith trailed off as he turned to the window. "Which is why I'll be on my way -- alloonnns-yyyy!"

Before Sam could protest, Smith leapt out of the window and onto the fire ladder, then slid down and out of sight. Sam looked to Gene, then back to the window, muttered "sod it," and followed suit.

Sam's boots slammed into the pavement. He grit his teeth on impact, then sprang forward and chased the edge of Smith's brown coat down the dank, poorly lit alleyway. Behind him, he could hear some faint shout from Gene about how he _wasn't_ going to pretend he was a bloody man-sized squirrel you little _shit_ , but it was lost in the pounding of Sam's feet on the ground and in his breathing, deep and controlled.

His senses honed in on uneven cobblestone and the brick walls that towered over him. Sam might have been reminded of a dream if his real bouts of slumber didn't have a tendency to turn into such cracked-up terror-fests in the first place, but then again -- this was classic dream fodder, wasn't it? Chasing someone -- sure only vaguely of the reason and even less of where they were -- breathing hard, fists clenched, head swimming from adrenaline and hazy oxygen, sharpened by an edge of irrational fear.

Or were you supposed to be the one getting chased? In dreams.

Sam shook his head, cleared his thoughts. Christ, he needed proper sleep.

He turned a corner and nearly bowled Smith over, who'd apparently decided to stop running and instead stand still as he tapped a finger on his chin. Sam staggered back a foot as Smith's eyes darted about with hummingbird attention span.

"Lost her. _Well_ ," Smith continued, heedless, "she probably isn't working alone, is she? Given the tachyon-saturated air in this area, I'd say there was some sort of catalyst for her actions -- I mean, some minor telepathic ability might have made Lupei more susceptible to the latent psychic field, but to be affected into doing something like _murder_..."

Sam stared at him. "What?"

"Exactly -- what could have morphed tachyon particles into a psychic field in the first place, and moreover, how..."

Smith trailed off as his gaze drifted back to Sam.

"Ah." He looked Sam up and down, as if reminding himself of something. "Er -- sorry. Got, erm. Ah-ha." He scratched his head. "Bit ahead of myself, wasn't I?"

Sam racked his brain for anything in his still-piss-poor 1973 vocabulary that might possibly explain what the hell Smith was on about, but only continued coming up with blank pages, and question marks, and the word "psychic."

With sudden sinking dread, Sam cleared his throat and asked with perfect composure, "DI Smith, could I see your badge?"

"Yes -- yes, of course." Smith dug into his coat, forced a grin, and thrust forward--

"That's a blank sheet of paper," Sam said.

Smith stared like he'd been struck across the face. He looked to his paper, then to Sam, then to a point somewhere past his shoulder.

"Is it really, Sam," he murmured.

An engine rumbled down the street. The blessedly solid bronze of the Cortina sped around the corner and squealed to a stop.

Gene barked, "In Hyde, does standing 'round while a suspect escapes pass for policing?!"

Sam had never felt so relieved to be shouted at. He snatched Smith's "badge," then stepped forward and shoved it through the Cortina's open window. "DI Smith's identification. Perhaps you lot should pay more attention to proper procedure before allowing a complete stranger access to a top-level investigation!"

Gene wrenched the Cortina into park. He took the blank ID-holder and gazed at it a moment, then snapped it shut.

Sam rapped his fingers on the car roof. "Well?"

"Well." Gene shoved the "badge" back at him. "Unless this is two days expired or some other picky-pain bollocks, I'd say Phyllis did her bloody fact-checking and I've nowt clue what you're on about, okay!"

Sam's eyes darted to the plain white paper, clean and blank and clear as fucking daylight, back to Gene's face.

"Are you mad?"

"Are _you_?"

Sam stumbled backward before he knew his feet had betrayed him. Smith appeared between them and plucked the paper from Sam's hand.

"I'm terribly sorry, DCI Hunt," he said, straight past Sam's dumbstruck face. "It should specify _Dr._ John Smith. Your DI caught me in a spot of lazy protocol, I'm afraid."

Sam's mouth went dry as the paper disappeared back into Smith's coat. Sam clenched his jaw and looked back to the Cortina, frantic, desperate, alone.

"Gene--"

"In the car, Tyler," Gene said. "We've bigger problems right now."


	4. I: Iron Man | ii

ii.

_is he alive or dead_   
_has he thoughts within his head_   
_we'll just pass him there_   
_why should we even care_

\---

Sam Tyler was insane.

He spent the better part of the car ride contemplating this fact, including the voices, the hallucinations, and the distinct probability that every storefront and pedestrian racing by the Cortina's window was nothing more than the obsessive-compulsive detail of a comatose dream.

But at least it'd been a consistent dream. At least it'd stuck to its own bloody rules of engagement, and hadn't let its madness slip past the confines of phone receivers and radio speakers and television screens. Sam could handle the odd replying voice here, a mixed-up headline there, but he'd never encountered anything like Doctor Detective Inspector Obviously-a-Bloody-Pseudonym John Smith, and now he hadn't a clue what the hell 1973's game had changed to. That the bastard had appeared in tandem with this whole Mangler mess only made his presence all the more unsettling. It was hard to ignore that they only had his word about the struggle in Lupei's flat and it was even harder to neglect now, on their way to the site of a fifth victim, that he'd been absent from the station the entire day.

And yet, it was Sam who looked the part of a mad bastard. Because Smith could fool them. And Sam couldn't.

Smith had enough sense to keep silent in the back seat all the way until they parked in front of the victim's multi-storey, but Sam realized as he opened the car door that even that had been eerie, controlled, like Smith's eyes hadn't spent any time on the outside scenery and all their time on the back of Sam's head.

Sam shuddered.

"Neighbors last saw the victim yesterday evening," Gene said as soon as they went up the steps and into the hall -- "they" meaning the three of them, with Smith wearing a strange little frown of concentration as if he was an invested party instead of a mental glitch designed specifically to make Sam's life even worse. "Apparently, Miss Kenton would take a evening constitution before retiring to her flat."

Sam raised a brow, momentarily distracted from his predicament. "She exercised?"

Gene grunted. "If that's your fascist word for it."

Several officers stood in a group by a cordoned door, with Ray mulling about at their center. As Sam and the others approached, Ray raised his eyes mid-gesture and then narrowed them. "Next wave of the Hyde invasion," he muttered aside to one of the plods.

Sam found himself annoyed, for once, not because of the slight but because of who it associated him with. Smith reinforced this by replying cheerily, "Oh, not an invasion, really -- more like a pair of diplomatic scouts," and then he patted Sam's shoulder with such friendliness -- such familiarity -- that Sam wanted to slam him against the floor and wrench cuffs on him then and there.

Instead, he forced a smile and said, "Yes, we're our own little sovereign nation." He shoved past Ray into the flat.

The place had, at one point, been a tidy affair -- beyond tidy, really, from the spotless walls to the minimalist shelves and the clean countertops, all attended to with the kind of care Sam associated more with his own twenty-first century sensibilities than the rustic brand of Manchester he'd become accustomed to.

And, like his own twenty-first century sensibilities, it was all rendered obsolete to the point of absurdity by the gory mess at its center.

"God..." Sam pressed a hand to his nose. If someone had taken a bucket of paint and smeared it round the floor with their fingers, he imagined it wouldn't look half as violent as the mess in front of him, oozing a horrible copper smell, framed by overturned chairs and a broken lamp sprayed with pinprick blood droplets.

Sam stepped around the gore and tried his best to take objective stock of the room. He could -- if he tried -- imagine that the mutilated body at the center of the living area had once been an innocent young woman, if he discounted the spilled intestines and broken hands, the bludgeoned cheeks and the punctured eyes. Christ.

Gene didn't sound like he was doing much better, in his gruff Guv way. "Mangler's never left a sodding corpse before." He glanced around at the toppled furniture. "Or a mess, for that matter."

Sam shook his head and looked to Ray as he swallowed around the knot in his throat. "Forensics?"

"On their way," Ray drawled, though it was hard to miss the slight pallor of his skin as he leaned against the doorframe. "So far, we've talked to neighbors and poked 'round the scene -- not enough to get your fine knickers in a twist," he interjected at Sam's scowl, "but so far, nothin'. Most we can tell, Brittany Kenton weren't expecting to kick it none soon. Bought garden vegetables from a neighbor yesterday mornin' -- apparently was a bit broke up over leavin' her boyfriend, nothin' else."

Sam grit his teeth and returned his attention to the scene, absorbing every sign of an unplanned struggle: the haphazard splintering of the nearby coffee table, the finger-smeared blood on the upholstery and chair arms. All of it incongruous with the Mangler's meticulous M.O. -- aside from the tell-tale post-mortem blood-letting. "This doesn't make any sense. Our serial killer has never broken his one-week routine before."

"Seems a whole boatload of goods aren't adding up to a full shipment," Gene muttered. He rubbed his eyes and that's when Sam remembered -- how they'd all taken the night off, and whose idea it had been.

He couldn't quite bring himself to point it out.

A low buzzing set Sam's teeth on edge, the same sound they'd heard at Lupei's flat. He glanced at Smith just in time to see him pocket some kind of tool.

"I wouldn't say that so quickly," Smith murmured.

A sharp spike of annoyance shot up in Sam, the likes of which he'd thought only Gene Hunt could inspire. He straightened and glared Smith down.

"What _would_ you say, DI Smith, if you feel inclined to enlighten us?"

Smith looked to him with a level of calm composure Sam wasn't prepared for. He pursed his lips and leaned back on the heels of his trainers.

"I could point out the fact that the killer's been found out -- they're scared, on the run, desperate. Naturally, they'd commit any crimes with more fury and less premeditation--"

A laugh escaped Sam's mouth. "Assuming we believe you, or your grand assumptions about Mrs. Lupei, or the magical bloodied pamphlet that appeared around the time of your arrival."

Smith narrowed his eyes. "Yes, assuming you believe me, or your detective constable's findings, or the results of my cross-analysis between the soil at Lupei's and the particles I managed to salvage from this flat's welcome mat."

"What 'analysis?'" Ray scoffed, tone relaxed and incredulous, quite unlike the tautness in Sam's shoulders or the quiet in Gene's voice.

"Yes," Gene asked, slow and even, "what analysis?"

"Analysis," Smith repeated, like it was a simple concept, before turning to Gene with cheerful, gleaming teeth. "Hasn't DI Tyler mentioned the things we can do in Hyde?"

"Doesn't mean they believe me," Sam snapped, so quickly he barely heard himself. The words clanged like cymbals and he felt his hands trembling, blood pumping -- _things we can do, things we can do--_

"Base to Alpha-One."

Sam opened his eyes about the same time Gene grabbed his radio, Ray muttered "nutter," and Smith marched into the flat's kitchen.

"Yeah, Phyllis?" Gene said. In Sam's peripheral vision, the Guv divided his attention between Smith, who was studying the cupboards, and Sam, who was studying Smith.

"Chris and Annie called in, said to tell you they found her."

"Found who?" Gene's voice faded from Sam's awareness Smith ran a hand along the countertop, turned on his heel, and opened the refrigerator door to a pile of carrots and celery. It occurred to Sam that he didn't know what struck him more -- the grim line of Smith's mouth, the intensity of his gaze, or the juxtaposition of both to Brittany Kenton's blood-soaked remains, lying just a few feet away.

Phyllis' tinny voice broke his thoughts. "The woman -- Chris was on about some woman. Loo-something."

Sam, Gene, and Smith all raised their heads.

"Shall I free a holding cell, Guv?"

\---

"Took your sweet time," Phyllis grumbled as soon as the three of them burst through the station's front doors. "DC Skelton wouldn't stop blatherin' 'bout his collar and proper protocol. Kept sayin' it was for the good of the--"

"Where's Annie?" Sam blurted. "I need to talk to her," he added before he could stop himself, painfully aware of the anxiety under his paper-thin veil of composure. Maybe Phyllis could tell, because she fixed him with an odd little stare and pointed upstairs.

Gene shoved forward before she could elaborate. "Moment, before Little Boy Tyler drops his trousers. Did you give a good look-see to that inquiry I called in?"

Sam didn't retort and didn't give a damn whatever arse-end lead Gene was chasing -- just turned away and caught a whole sodding eyeful of Smith, hands in his coat pockets and one trainer sole rubbing small circles in the tiled floor. When he caught Sam's gaze, he smiled brightly.

Sam turned away.

_All in your head, all in your head._

Gene's voice filtered back in. "Like I thought?"

"Like you thought, Guv," Phyllis replied.

Sam felt Gene's fingers dig into his shoulder as he steered him toward the lift like a dog led by the scruff of its neck. "Right, then, off for a friendly chat with our prime suspect. You too, Hydey-ho!" he called back at Smith, who followed them with a bounce in his step.

Sam wrenched himself out of Gene's grasp once they got in the lift, seething from the close proximity to the Hyde-borne bastard. It only got worse when Gene asked, like they were chatting over a bloody card table, "Been at C-Division long, then?" to which Smith replied with some flipping vague answer that Gene just nodded his head to -- of course he would just nod his head, one made-up mental aberration to another -- as they stepped off the lift.

 _In coma, no one can hear you scream._ Sam's eyes darted around for Annie. No sign. Naturally.

He slunk after Gene and Smith down the hall toward their unofficial interrogation-room-slash-torture-chamber. As they entered Lost and Found, he looked toward the table for Lupei, the possibly innocent Romanian woman who would no doubt receive more than her fair share of fist-slams and derogatory slurs before the end of the hour.

But all he saw was an empty chair, caught in a ribbon of light from the room's sole window. Sam frowned, existential panic momentarily forgotten as he looked to Gene, who raised both eyebrows in pantomime surprise.

"My word, seems there's been a terrible mix-up. Right, can't waste a perfectly good interrogation."

He stepped around the table and yanked the chair from under it.

Then he looked to Smith.

"Detective Inspector. Why don't you give this seat an arse-warming, because far as I can tell from a call-in on your credentials, you aren't qualified to take a shit in this station."

Sam blinked. Gene glanced at him.

"What, Tyler? Did you think I'd completely ignore you?"

Sam didn't know what to say. _Thank you_ came to mind. _Thank God_ came next. _I am believed by someone outside of myself, and you don't know how much that means to me'_ came a haphazard last, interrupted when Smith cleared his throat.

"I -- well." Smith ran a hand through his static-charged hair. "I, ah... I can explain--"

"Right large bollocks to impersonate a member of the queen's constabulary." Gene took a step toward him, voice horribly soft. "Right suicide to do it in my department."

"Like I said--"

"Did I say you could talk, you freckle-faced _fart?_ "

Gene's lips snapped together. A gob of spit hit Smith's cheek.

Smith paused and swallowed. He brought up a finger and wiped his face with a small, dainty motion.

"'Fraid it's not the best skin I've had, is it?"

Smith's chest hit the table with a hard clang. Sam caught the tail end of a winded breath as Gene's fingers dug into the back of Smith's coat, dragged him up close enough to snarl to his ear.

"You have ten seconds to tell me why you crawled into my corner of the Earth before I loop so many charges 'round your neck that you'll choke on rope before you _hang_ from it."

Smith coughed and hacked and raised his head, and fixed a wide-eyed stare on Sam -- right on him, like he was the be-all, end-all of everything in this room, everything in the universe. Like Smith was expecting something -- waiting for a sign.

Sam looked back at him.

Smith's brow creased. "It's hard to -- hard to explain."

"Really?" Gene's hands dropped their grip on him. "Let's make it a bit easier, then."

Smith breathed out and pulled himself from the table. He swallowed and turned toward them.

"Right." He cleared his throat, adjusted his lapels. "Glad you've--"

Gene's fist slammed into Smith's face. Air burst from his mouth as his body crashed into the suspect chair. For once, Sam didn't flinch when the chair toppled and clattered. He didn't blink an eye when Smith's body hit the floor like a cut of cold meat. Instead, a sense of vindication thrummed through him as Gene grabbed a fistful of the bastard's hair and yanked him to his knees. This was fair, Sam thought as he felt his body go calm, as he crossed his arms over his chest. Smith deserved this. He was a dangerous man in a diseased world, playing the victim, pretending to be harmless, pretending to be less than he was.

Sam might have been smiling.

Gene glanced at him before he turned back to Smith. "Making this easier. Let's see -- how 'bout we start with your real name, seeing as 'John Smith' fringes on criminal embarrassment."

Blood-tinged spit dripped from Smith's lip, marking a trail from his mouth to his chin. He raised the cuff of his coat to wipe it away, eyes hard and dark with a strange, practiced tranquility.

"I'm the Doctor."

"Oh, good." Gene used his grip on Smith's hair to shake his head back and forth, then tossed it to the side like a ragdoll. "Does that mean you've made a hobby of cutting people to itty bitty pieces?"

Smith swayed with the momentum before recovering his balance. He staggered to his feet with a kind of serene, dogged composure that didn't fit his lanky figure -- like this wasn't the first time he'd been knocked down, and it wasn't the worst.

"I came here," he said, an edge of fury to his words, "to help save these people."

Sam tried not to look smug as he stepped forward. "No offense, Dr. Smith, but you seem to be doing a rubbish job of it."

"Just 'the Doctor,' thank you." Smith snapped back.

"My, you are mental." Gene cracked his knuckles. "Suppose we know why he's a fan of yours, Tyler."

"Suppose we do," Sam muttered. There were questions in that vein he wanted to ask this man -- questions he couldn't get away with while Gene was bearing down on his target like an armored tank. Smith -- because calling him 'the Doctor' seemed the equivalent of replying to an infant in gibberish -- continued to appear battered but unyielding, even as Gene smashed his fist into the bastard's shoulder and sent him hurtling into the wall.

"If I'm honest, I couldn't give a rat's arse what your prozzie mother decided to call you, so let's cut to the grand prix chase, shall we?"

Gene's elbow and forearm slammed into Smith's chest just as he regained his footing, pinning him to the hard ledge of the room's single window.

"If you aren't a twisted piece of murdering bastard _scum_ , what do you suppose you're doing here, acting the part of a bloody officer?"

Smith heaved against the pressure but didn't raise his arms. Sam noticed that, suddenly -- he hadn't raised his arms in defense, just left them rigid at his sides, fists clenched and trembling, like he was ready to punch, but he couldn't. _No,_ Sam thought with sudden fury. _Wouldn't._

"I told you." Smith writhed. "I'm trying to save the people of this city, or do you think that beating someone senseless is as good as putting a killer behind bars?"

Gene barked out a laugh. "Forget 'fan', Tyler. He's your evil sodding twin!"

"And you," Smith growled back, " _you_ are an unevolved Neanderthal too blind to see a murderer's trail past your own fists."

Smith's head cracked against the window ledge. Sam caught the shape of his body sliding the length of the wall to the floor as Gene withdrew his hand and stepped back from him.

"I know a murderer when I see one," Gene said.

Smith raised his eyes, wide and dazed. Gene crouched down to meet them, face hard and dark, voice low and quiet as a tomb. "I know every trick in the book. Every big smile, every poncy air, every dirty scam you miserable bastards try to pull on people who don't know an ounce better than to swallow your poison. I can tell a murdering monster the moment I lay eyes on one, and let me tell you, 'Doctor,' you won't fool me."

Smith stared back, nose bloody, cheek red and swollen, eyes watering from the onslaught.

He looked away.

Sam stepped forward before he realized his feet had moved him. He shoved Gene aside.

"Christ, Guv, could've given him concussion," he muttered, though he knew he'd considered this and hadn't particularly cared mere seconds ago. _God,_ Sam thought, some retort of Gene's flying by his ear as he grabbed Smith's arm and hauled him up, _bastard's rubbing off on me._

"Have a plonk bandage him up and be done with it," Gene grumbled, midway through straightening his tie. "I'll not be letting the little scrotum out of our sight on account of some nancy medical fuss."

I'm with you there, was what Sam meant to say, but instead came out, "He had no choice."

Gene paused. Smith raised his head.

"--but to provoke you," Sam exhaled, like he'd been trapped between breaths. "He had no choice but to provoke you, and you are a great big ape, aren't you?"

"Better than a great big jessie." Gene stepped forward and wrenched Smith's arm out of Sam's grasp, then dragged him toward the door. "Lucky for you, 'the Doctor,' my girl of an associate insists you meet 'the Nurse.'"

Smith's eyes trailed from Sam toward the exit as they slowly lost their stunned quality, their lack of focus. He shook his head, and then, against all reason, smiled.

"That won't be necessary, DCI Hunt. I'm feeling quite better already."

Gene paused and looked to Sam, face gleaming like a line of Blackpool lights. "You hear that, Tyler? Man's ready to go another round."

Sam frowned. He marched to the door and again grabbed hold of Smith's free arm. "Exactly. He needs his head checked."

Gene raised his chin as he shoved open the door to the hallway. "If picking fights with Gene Hunt is a symptom of nuttery, I ought to have half this city committed -- with you at the front of the queue."

Sam rolled his eyes as they dragged Smith into CID's front corridor. They took barely two steps out of Lost and Found when, like a beacon of light through a miserable haze, Annie appeared from the bullpen, a box of evidence in her arms.

"What--" She looked from Smith's bruised face to Sam. "Who's this?"

"DI Smith," Sam muttered.

Annie went rigid. "Why's he in custody?"

Gene yanked Smith forward another foot. "Fraud, forgery, and bloody fine police work. Mind stepping out of the way, Miss Marple?"

Annie shifted to one side of the hall, clutching her box to her chest as Sam met her stare with a weary frown.

"Smith's not a real officer. We're arresting him in connection with the serial killings."

"Not a real -- how?" Annie asked as they passed by. Sam was about to reply with reassurance and a wan smile when Smith's arm went rigid against his hand.

"Where'd you get that?" Smith whispered.

Smith stopped in his tracks, feet rooted to the ground. It took a moment for Sam to realize he'd fixed his eyes on Annie, and it took a second after that for him to dig his fingers into Smith's arm and yank him away from her. "Come on. Enough talk."

"Wait," Annie said.

Sam paused. Annie shifted in place. "Where did I get what?"

Smith swallowed. "That."

Annie glanced down to her box of evidence, draped over the top by an old scarf ribboned with alternating colors. Sam mirrored her frown as she looked up, shaken but holding steady.

"It's one of the items I collected from a victim's flat. I don't think--"

Gene wrenched Smith toward the lift and out of Sam's grasp.

"That's right, Cartwright. Women don't think about how they shouldn't chit-chat about a case with the _top bleeding suspect._ "

"Sorry, Guv," Annie murmured, though she seemed distant. Distracted.

Smith still stared at the box as Gene dragged him down the hall. "Which victim was that," he pleaded, nearly a yell, "which number--"

Smith's words cut off with a small cry of pain as the Guv kicked him into the lift's circle of fluorescent light. Gene whirled around, breathing hard, to glare down Sam expectantly.

"I was thinking I'd brief DC Cartwright," Sam said.

Gene's eyes narrowed and then rolled to the ceiling. He hit a button on the inside of the lift's wall.

"Right. Suit yourself, Casanova."

One last shout echoed out of the lift -- "what number" -- before its doors clanged shut and left the hall silent.

Tension melted from Sam's body. He laid a hand on Annie's shoulder. "Are you all right?"

Annie's expression faded from trepidation into deep thought. She frowned, first at him and then down at the box's contents.

"This scarf belonged to Sarah Wellington," she said, slow and steady. "The fourth victim."

Her brow furrowed as she raised her eyes to his.

"Do you think that's important?"

\---

Annie's hands were calm, curled around the sides of her tea mug. Sam's were empty, fidgeting uselessly over the top of the table. A few late-night officers sat at the nearby benches, chatting, laughing. They faded from Sam's awareness like fog on a sea, like he was marooned on an island in space and time, adrift from the rest of the world.

A voice flowed back to him over the distance.

"You mean that he knew the same things you do? From Hyde?"

The world lurched sharply, nauseatingly, back into focus. The officers were officers. Annie was Annie. 1973 was still a cage and Sam was still its captive.

He shook his head, ran a hand down his face.

"From where I come from," he mumbled. "Yes."

A pause lingered in the air between them. Annie let out a sigh. "I told you to be careful with him."

Her voice was weary, but kind. When Sam looked up, he saw patience in her expression -- the affectionate sort, like one might use with a dog too skittish to trust its owner. Sam was reminded, viscerally, of how Gene had yanked him into the lift on the way upstairs.

"Suppose I should have," Sam said, throat dry.

It was an apology, of a kind. Annie nodded and brought her tea to her lips as Sam stared down at his hands.

They sat in silence for a few long moments before he let out a breath. "He was talking... nonsense. I don't know." Sam's melancholy took on an edge of frustration as he tapped his fingers against the top of the table. "Did I tell you he knew me by name, when we first met? He said he'd been looking forward to it. To meeting me."

Annie frowned. "Maybe he's read the papers? You and the Guv have been mentioned -- Manchester Gazette and the like."

"Maybe." Sam ran a hand through his hair. "But it's more than that. The way he talks, the way he acts... like back at Lupei's flat -- he started coming over all Ziggy Stardust."

"Ziggy Stardust?"

"I don't know, like he was saying something out of Star Wars -- Star Trek," Sam corrected, quickly. "'Catalyst' this and 'psychic field' that -- acting like he knew exactly what the killer was up to, and... god, _psychic_..."

A laugh escaped him as soon as his words reached his ears and rebounded to his brain, at the thought of it, the utter absurdity of it all. It sank into him like a hard drink, and he shook his head and smiled at Annie -- and then faltered. Where he expected common understanding he instead found her stiff and silent.

Sam swallowed down the rest of his mirth. His last chuckle jolted out as a cough. "What?"

Annie's eyes drifted to the table. "Nothing, Sam. It's just..." Her finger trailed up and down the handle of her mug. "It's just that you sound an awful lot like that sometimes."

Sam opened his mouth, but couldn't find any words.

 _Exactly,_ was all that came to mind. _That's exactly why he scares me._

Annie shook her head and reached into her bag. "I almost forgot, sir -- I finished that project you gave me. The, um... the profile."

"The psych report?" Sam sat up. "Weren't you busy tracking down Lupei with Chris?"

Annie smiled coyly as she tugged out a file and laid it on the table. "I finished last night, but you and the Guv went into the field before I could..."

 _I snapped at you like an idiot before you could tell me._ Sam nodded and pressed his hand over the file. "Thank you, Annie."

She averted her gaze to the food counter. "It wasn't as if..."

"Really." Sam swallowed thickly. "Thank you. For everything."

Annie's smile widened and for several seconds the world went right-side up again.

Then she bit her lip. "Sam, there's... something else odd that I wanted to ask you about--"

"Tyler!"

Sam turned to see the Guv slam the canteen doors open and approach like a bull at his matador. "We've a bit of a problem, and by 'problem' I mean a bastard brick wall between us and our suspects."

"So that'd be your stubbornness, then," Sam replied.

"Don't test me, Tyler, not when I've one cell filled with an old gypsy's gibberish and another with a fraud copper who insists on talking only with you, which, I might add," Gene growled as he leaned one palm on the table, "is further proof that I've a member of Club Daft-Loonybins for a sodding DI."

Sam leaned back from Gene, scowling at his temper, riled-up even by Guv standards. "I'm assuming from your mood that your and Ray's usual tactics haven't gotten you anywhere."

"Did you think we'd leave him to sit pretty in a holding cell?" Gene cast him a strange glare. "Or are you cross we knocked him 'round without you?"

Sam's hand went rigid on the table. He felt Annie's frown on him and quickly said, "Listen -- why don't you stop yelling at us for a change and listen to the lead we've opened on the case?"

Sam gestured to the file between himself and Annie.

Gene's eyes flicked down. "What's this, then -- a marriage proposal?"

Annie straightened in her seat. "It's a psychological profile of the killer -- based on what I've been able to gather from the state of the crime scenes, the neighborhood patterns, the identity of the..."

She trailed off as Gene snatched up the thing and opened it. He scanned the page.

"'Judging by the deliberate placement of the victims' remains, the killer likely considers himself highly intelligent. He resents authority and is willing to put himself at risk to prove his mastery over others' -- _well_." Gene snapped it shut. "Here I thought he loved fluffy kittens and worked a soup kitchen on weekends!"

He tossed the file on the table, scattering a handful of papers across its surface. Annie reached forward to collect them, hands steady.

Sam slammed his palms on the table and turned to glower at Gene.

"If we're so bloody useless, why'd you storm in here?"

Gene grabbed Sam by his jacket collar and yanked him up from the chair, "Like I said, that lunatic's mouth is shut like a nun's legs on Sunday unless I drag your barmy arse to his door."

Sam rolled his shoulders out of Gene's grasp and shoved him right back. "So you want me to talk to him?"

"Talk to him? What do you think this is, your quack's fairy office?" Gene straightened his collar and shook out his arms. "No, we'll let him stew in his own shit-pile until he feels like mouthing off again. Meantime, you can either help us wrestle sense out of the gyppo or stay and chat skirts and boys with your girlfriend."

He turned on his heel and stalked toward the exit without so much as a glance over his shoulder. Sam scowled and then gave an apologetic shrug to Annie, who was already gathering up her things. She managed a smile, small and sincere.

"It's all right, Sam. We'll talk tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," Sam promised as he followed after Gene. He turned toward the canteen's double-doors as they swung back and forth between the room's yellow light and the muddy brown of the hall. "I'll see you tomorrow."

\---

Sam heard Lupei's mutters before he saw the cell. The woman's words echoed through the holding corridor; high, grief-stricken, nearly in pain. Sam realized he'd heard the same voice earlier, when he and Gene had torn through the run-down flat.

Just before they'd run into Smith.

Chris stood by the door, tugging a fresh cigarette from his pack. "Makes a racket, don't she," he said, an edge of pride to his pity. Sam shuttered the view slot aside and peered in at the suspect -- a thirty-something woman huddled under a thick shawl, stained and scuffed with dirt.

"Stapan..." she cried. "Stapan este printre noi. Stapan..."

Gene leaned against the wall. "Bloody mess, this. Gypsy can't shut her gob, Doctor won't open his -- neither's given us a chuffing word on who did what and we haven't a clue where they stashed the bodies."

Sam slammed the slot closed and looked to Gene, incredulous. "You're actually calling him 'Doctor'."

Gene shrugged. "Sure as sodding hell isn't 'Smith'."

"Right shame." Chris sighed as he brought his cigarette to his mouth. He pulled out a lighter and leaned toward it. "Seemed a good bloke."

Sam twisted his mouth as Chris flicked the lighter and got nothing but sparks. "What about Lupei? How'd you find her?"

Chris glanced up, still flicking. "Oh... 'Twere Cartwright, Boss. She heard us talkin' 'bout the pamphlet -- looked up Lupei in the archives. Turns out her nephew was once booked on burglary -- found her at his address."

Sam deadpanned. _Of course it was Cartwright,_ he thought as Chris continued to flick the lighter ineffectually. _No one else here can see what's right in bloody front of them._

He rolled his eyes back to Gene. "Have we got anything on this... 'Doctor', yet? Identification, aliases...?"

Gene glared back at him. "If we did, you think we'd be standing 'round like Buckingham bloody guards?"

Chris stared morosely at his unlit cigarette. "Didn't have a thing on him, Boss. No ID but his badge--"

"It's a blank sheet of paper," Sam groused.

"You're a blank sheet of unhinged," Gene shot back.

"In any case." Sam nodded at Lupei's cell. "What's this about? Some kind of psychotic break?"

Gene snorted. "Emphasis on 'psychotic'."

Chris pocketed his faulty lighter and shrugged. "She's been mumblin' since we picked her up. Even her family was spooked." He scratched his chin. "Somethin' 'bout a bloke named... Stefan?"

"Stapan."

They turned toward the voice, an echo behind a cell door down the hall. " _Stapan este printre noi._ That's what she's saying."

Sam and Gene exchanged looks. Gene strode to the cell door and cracked the slot aside.

"Mind repeating that in non-gypsy-bollocks, Doctor?"

Sam caught a glimpse of Smith -- the "Doctor" -- through the door. He stood at the center of the cell, head bandaged on one side, eyes narrowed at the wall like it wasn't the thick, rough slab of concrete it was. Like if he stared hard enough he might see cracks in the universe.

"It means 'master'," he whispered. "'The master is among us.'"

He turned toward them -- toward Gene. Like he daren't fix his gaze on anything else.

"I need to speak with DI Tyler. Alone."

Gene tensed. "Like sodding hell you do."

"Guv--" Sam interjected, not quite prepared for the fierce glower that Gene set upon him as soon as he turned his head. Sam kept his voice level and nodded toward the end of the hall. "A word?"

Gene's eyes flicked between Sam and the door slot before he finally made his way down the corridor. Sam followed, patting Chris' shoulder on the way. "Keep watch."

"Wilco," Chris said, blinking.

Sam turned the hallway's corner and found Gene leaning against the wall. He regarded Sam with a cool stare. "I expect you think it's a good idea to do exactly as he wants."

"Where's the harm if it gets him to talk?" Sam reasoned.

"Oh, I don't know." Gene crossed his arms. "Perhaps my DI standing 'round again like a happy Hitler youth."

Sam's expression faltered. "What?"

"Never seen you so pleased with yourself during interrogation," Gene said with a strained sort of calm, staring at the wall opposite him. "Least of all when your poncy notebook isn't the weapon of choice."

Sam felt something wash over him -- like water, clear and cold, falling from heights unknown. This was something he hadn't thought about. This was something he didn't want to think about.

And logically, he shouldn't have to. Sam grit his teeth and grabbed blindly for something rational, something ugly. "So it's all right for everyone else to have a Neolithic moment, is it? 'Sides me, of course. _That_ might threaten King Hunt's dominion--"

"I'm concerned whenever a member of my team doesn't act how they bloody well should," Gene answered, nary a syllable raised.

Sam clenched his fists and seethed in place as he stared at Gene -- Gene Hunt, the last obstacle between him and the man who might have answers, a window, an exit. The Doctor, who might be here to taunt him. The Doctor, who might be his escape.

He watched as that obstacle reached inside its suit jacket and tugged out a flask, as it twisted the cap with calloused fingers.

"Lost someone down those alleys, once. 'Round Percy Lane."

Sam refocused on Gene with confusing clarity -- like he hadn't been a person a moment ago. He frowned as tension left his body.

"Do you mean a crook?" Sam asked.

Gene threw back a swig from the flask. He pulled it from his mouth and kept his eyes on it a moment.

Then he shrugged and capped it again.

"I mean that nothing good comes of that place and nothing good will come of him." He pocketed his flask. "But have it your way. Talk to the murdering bastard."

Sam couldn't help a small smile. He nodded, decisive. "I'll get what we need, Guv."

Gene shouldered past Sam toward the corridor's exit. "You'd better. Chris!"

"Right, Guv." Chris scrambled down the hallway on Gene's heels and handed off the cell keys to Sam.

"G'luck, Boss." He grinned. "Don't lose 'im."

Sam watched as Chris followed Gene down the hall. Their footsteps faded out of sight and out of mind, leaving Sam and the Doctor finally, inevitably, inescapably alone.


	5. I: Iron Man | iii

iii.

_he was turned to steel_   
_in the great magnetic field_   
_when he traveled time_   
_for the future of mankind_

\---

"You're in danger," said the Doctor.

It was strange how for a moment Sam believed him. How in the space of an eye-blink, one millisecond and another, he looked at this man and felt nothing but trust. It might have been the earnest expression, or the voice -- slow, deliberate, sincere. There was the breathing, too, deep and then shallow, like waves crashing on a rocky cove with all the force of an oncoming storm.

And then it evaporated, as if it'd never been.

Sam steeled his stance, crossed his arms. He raised his chin like the mean Manc copper he was.

"I'm not concerned for my own safety." He narrowed his eyes. "And I don't believe threats when they come from inside a cell."

"It's not a threat." Sam heard the Doctor shift his weight, press a fist to the other side of the door and lean on it. "I told you, I'm trying to _help_ you."

Sam stepped up to the door and met the Doctor through the slot.

"Who are you?" he asked.

The man gazed back. "I told you. I'm the Doc--"

"I don't mean whatever name my mind's tossed out for a _laugh_ ," Sam growled, voice low, fists rigid at his sides. "What the hell are you and where do you get off rattling the bars of my sodding coma prison?"

The last of it echoed with a horrible din, like thunder after lightning.

_Prison, prison._

The Doctor's expression softened. His mouth parted as his brow creased. He broke eye contact and looked to the floor, body sagging under an unseen burden.

"Oh, Sam..."

He sounded like Annie. He sounded like someone caught in the depths of concern, riddled with nerves and regret. He sounded, Sam realized, like he cared.

Sam slammed his hand against the door. "Don't talk like you fucking know me."

The Doctor swallowed. He wet his lips and babbled ardently, "But I do -- oh, I do know you, Sam. I know what it's like for you, and I'm sorry -- I am so, so sorry for all that's happened, and all you've suffered--"

"You don't know." Sam exhaled. "What this is like -- Doctor, you don't _know_..."

He heard his voice crack under its own weight. Shallow breaths heaved in and out of his chest as his eyes shut tight against something he couldn't -- shouldn't understand. He felt sick, like something was spinning in him, whirling lopsidedly, coming round and round again, beating, beating--

"I'm sorry," the Doctor whispered.

Sam opened his eyes, vision blurry, ears pounding. The Doctor took a breath and continued--

"I'm sorry, but we haven't much time." He took a step from the door and Sam heard him pace quickly, purposefully. Like a shark, Sam thought, that had to keep moving or else it would die. "Sam, I need you to do something for me."

 _Go to hell_ , Sam's mind jolted out. Outwardly, he breathed, "Why should I?"

The Doctor paused, then sighed. "Because I need you to trust me."

Sam barked out a laugh. "Right. Yeah."

"I need you to look through my coat," the Doctor persevered, as if he hadn't heard Sam at all. "Are you listening, Sam? My coat. The brown coat. Your DC left it on the chair outside my cell -- do you see it?"

Sam turned as he steadied his breathing and allowed his world to settle on these words, simple words, easy instructions despite their despicable origin. He saw what the Doctor described, just a few feet away on the empty cell guard's chair -- the damn brown coat, folded over the seatback instead of stuffed in a bloody evidence bag where it belonged.

 _Chris, you div_ , Sam thought distantly.

"Look in the pocket," the Doctor urged, gently. "The inside pocket. You'll find something."

Something like a booby trap or a magical door-unlocked or whatever else rule-breaking dream apparitions were allowed to have. Sam wasn't sure if he cared about the dangers at this point so much as the bloody answers.

He stepped toward the thing, then picked it up and shook it out like a particularly distasteful rag.

"Quickly," the Doctor said. Sam growled out some menacing sound as he opened one side of the coat to its inside pocket and stuck his hand in. It went deeper than he expected, and the Doctor tapped his foot as Sam's hand finally brushed against something. "Did you find it?" the Doctor demanded.

"I don't know," Sam huffed out, ready to give the bastard a proper smack as he yanked the thing out of the pocket's depths. "This had better be good, with all your--"

He stopped. Everything stopped. The world froze on its axis, went silent, his vision gone, blindsided, focused solely on the object in his hand.

It was small, and plastic, and covered in numbered buttons. The top of it sported the words "Virgin Mobile" and the screen asked him if he'd like to make a call.

\---

He stood for minutes like that. Hours. Time folded in on itself like paper, tore and shred and crumpled to nothing. The screen shimmered with the motion of his shaking hand, and he heaved out, fumbled, tried to catch his breath as the thing threatened to slip out from between his fingers, out of his grasp, out of existence.

"I can help you, Sam."

His eyes wandered up, slow with fear that this thing would disappear the moment he looked away from it. But instead, all he saw was a slice of the Doctor's face through the door slot, wide-eyed, pleading.

Sam opened his mouth. A hundred questions rattled through his head but only one slipped past his lips.

"Can you get me home?"

The Doctor looked back at him. Some hesitance wrote itself on his face, some remorse, some biting grief. After a long second, he breathed out like it pained him to his core.

"Yes, Sam. I think I might."

\---

It should have been harder to tug a door open while a potential murderer waited behind it. But the key turned smoothly, the hinges creaked quietly, and the Doctor stepped out of the cell. He glanced up the corridor and then snatched his coat from the chair.

"We need to get to your car," he said as he threw it over his shoulders.

Despite everything -- because of everything -- Sam let out a laugh, dry and mirthless. "We'll drive to the future, then. Do I look like I own a Delorean?"

"No, no." The Doctor waved him off as he strode on by, and that -- someone reacting to an eighties pop culture reference with casual dismissal instead of outright confusion -- must have been what truly sent Sam over the edge, because he suddenly found his hand on the Doctor's arm and his fingers in his sleeve, heaving and shaking and sharply aware of the mobile phone in his other hand.

"Tell me you're real." Words boiled up his throat. "Tell me you're real -- that you aren't going to disappear, please, you can't.... don't leave me here. Don't leave me."

The Doctor reached for him. He pressed his hand over Sam's and squeezed.

"I'd never leave you. Never."

Sam swallowed and nodded, trying to ignore the blur of his vision, the tightness in his throat. He tore his eyes away and tugged his hand out from under the Doctor's, then focused on one step after the next.

"We'll have to make sure we... make sure we avoid anyone. Going out." Sam let out a shaky breath and wondered whether or not Phyllis or any of the other WPCs were at their posts this time of night. "It's late. We should..."

"Shouldn't go," said a voice from the end of the hall. "That's his plan -- for you to go."

In his fixation over one suspect, Sam had almost forgotten about the other.

Sam and the Doctor slowly turned toward Lupei's cell. The Doctor strode down the hall toward it.

"'What plan?" the Doctor asked.

Sam followed at a distance, struck by the Doctor's expression -- calm and sharp, fiercely in control. Rustling came from inside the cell.

"Don't know," Lupei's voice drifted into the corridor, her breaths short, words stilted. "But I felt it. He wants us to play our parts. For you. For him."

Sam looked between the Doctor and the door slot. "What's she on about?"

The Doctor didn't answer. He took another step toward the cell door, face drawn and dark. "Is that why you left clues for me when you murdered those people?"

"Doctor--" Sam tried.

The Doctor's hand shot up to silence him. "Walking stick with the first victim, flute with the second, cape with the third. Scarf with the fourth victim -- that's what tipped me off -- and let's not forget the celery in the fifth's icebox. Mundane things, _my_ things -- hidden in the evidence lists, where only I would notice them. Is that the 'plan' you're talking about?"

"I only put the scarf," Lupei whispered. "I only did the fourth."

The Doctor froze. "What?"

Sam was missing something. Sam was missing something horribly important, horribly scary, if the look on the Doctor's face was any indication, the way he took a single step backward. Lupei's face appeared in the door slot, eyes bloodshot.

"I told you, Doctor. He wants us to play our parts. For you." Her gaze moved to Sam. "For our master."

Sam felt a hand grip his arm, tight and shaking.

"We need to go," the Doctor said.

"But--"

" _Now._ "

The Doctor yanked him down the hall, gait strong and steady, on the near side of running.

"You won't find what you're looking for," Lupei cried out behind them. "He's long gone -- gone, gone, in another form, in another's hand, exactly as _he_ wants--"

The Doctor slammed out of the cell block. Sam barely kept pace, too baffled by the Doctor's urgency to say anything. He felt like a shadow, a faint stain on the world, a wisp on the wind as he flew past scenery that had become familiar over the past few months and now looked alien all over again. The grimy front doors, the chipped front steps, the undersized car park. Sam still didn't feel grounded as he and the Doctor slowed to walking speed and came upon Sam's seventies-era Grenada.

The Doctor finally let go and circled toward the passenger's side.

Sam stood near the driver's door, breathing hard. "What the hell was that?"

The Doctor pressed a palm to the top of the car's roof. His fingers clenched against the metal. "There's more than one killer."

Sam stared at him. "What?"

"The Mangler isn't one single psychopath." The Doctor turned toward Sam, bandaged face grave and ashen. "It's a series of people."

"What are you suggesting?" Sam sputtered out. "Some kind of Murderers Anonymous club?"

"They're under the influence of a Chameleon object." The Doctor shook his head. "It's controlling them through a psychic link. Same modus operandi, same motive -- but a different perpetrator each time."

Right, Sam thought. He'd found his ticket out of Hell, and it happened to be a raving madman.

Sam grit his teeth and looked past the Doctor's shoulder at the Guv's Cortina, sitting empty and ominous a few spaces away. "We don't have time for this," he muttered.

He felt the mobile still clutched in his palm, skin red and pink round the edges of it. He shoved it in his jacket pocket like he would normally, like it was bloody 2006 again, then yanked out his car keys, shoved them in the door, and got himself inside.

He reached over to unlock the passenger's side and turned the ignition. The Doctor skittered in and immediately began searching the dash.

"When did it go missing?" he asked.

Sam pulled out of the space and onto the road. He jammed down the pedal and sped off in a random direction, eager to put lightyears between them and the station. "When did what go missing?"

The Doctor's fingers danced over the empty 8-track player. "The tape. The tape right here."

Sam's eyes narrowed at the tarmac as two lines of thoughts converged, as his fool-following of the past few minutes came back to slap him in the face. "Is that all you needed my car for? To find a tape?"

"Sam," the Doctor said, deadly. "This is important."

Sam scowled, because David Bowie's _Hunky Dory_ seemed decidedly un-important at a moment like this, just like it had ever since Sam had first arrived in this horrible wreck of a decade. Despite the initial iPod parallelism, the thing had ended up broken most of the time anyway, skipping tracks, pausing randomly, sometimes repeating nothing but the _cli-cli-cli-click_ of the tape's metal foil jamming in between one song and another. Sam had wrestled with it a couple months back while on assignment with Annie, and when she'd gently told him that she'd never heard it play anything at all, it'd been the last straw.

"I tossed it," Sam said.

"You--" The Doctor's head whipped toward him. He gaped. "What! You what -- _what?"_

"It was broken. I tossed it in a dustbin." Sam's hands tightened on the steering wheel. He felt increasingly agitated by his lack of direction as he sped away from the station, and by something else, too -- how Camille Lupei had stared at him in the cell block, and how the Doctor now wrung his hands in his lap, fast and frightened.

The Doctor stared out the windscreen. "What dustbin?"

\---

The assignment with Annie had been staking out an old factory for an illegal poker game, and the job itself had been about as exciting as it sounded -- meaning not. The two of them had ended up parked in a dank alley, mostly staring at an unmarked doorway while hidden behind a pile of dustbins and assorted garbage, hence Sam's sudden impulse to throw away the thing at the time.

And hence why Sam stood there now, as the Doctor slammed the car door open and dashed toward the mess.

"It'll be long gone by now," Sam offered in monotone, but the lanky bastard completely ignored him and instead knelt down in the midst of the garbage.

"If I can pinpoint the direction of the lingering psychic signature... if there are enough tachyon particles in this area -- yes, maybe," he muttered as he dug a hand into one of his inside pockets, apparently unaware that there was anyone in close vicinity worth speaking to except himself.

Sam shuddered, though whether it was because of the cold night air or the Doctor's continued use of the word "psychic" was anyone's best guess. A mental apparition was allowed its quirks, Sam supposed, if an escape back to the waking world was one of its functions -- and that's exactly what Sam had decided the Doctor was. An apparition. Time-travel was impossible; therefore, a time-traveler was impossible; therefore, this world was impossible.

The police radio in Sam's hand crackled briefly and his eyes darted down toward it. He'd kept his ear fixed on the thing ever since they'd left the station, waiting for Gene to raise the inevitable alarm once he and the others realized that their DI had absconded with a mass-murder suspect. But so far, nothing. A pang of bitter humor hit Sam as he mused that the Guv's trust in him must have moved far past the old Vic Tyler incident if he still hadn't checked in on the cell block -- or perhaps Sam's mind was giving him some unrealistic leeway while on the cusp of waking him up. And wouldn't that be nice, Sam thought with a sudden weight in his stomach, if Gene Hunt's trust had never been real enough to betray in the first place.

"No! Oh, no, no, _no!_ "

The Doctor dug frantically through his coat. Sam shoved the radio back in his jacket and jogged over.

"What's wrong?"

"Five trans-dimensional pockets and your people manage to frisk me of my screwdriver! Now, that's..." The Doctor glanced at Sam with a mixed glare-pout reminiscent of a precocious four year-old. "Well, that's... it's unfair. And moreover..."

The Doctor's expression hardened. The four year-old vanished, replaced by something much older. "We need to go back for it."

Sam tried to parse out one form of the Doctor's lunacy from the other. "Go back to the _station?_ Risk our lives for some... tool?"

"Without it, we'll lose--" The Doctor ran a hand down his face and then through his hair, or at least the parts poking out through the bandages. "We'll never find him."

"Who?"

"The killer," the Doctor hissed. "Not that you'd know that, tossing out Chameleon objects willy-nilly!"

"The hell are you on about?" Sam clenched a fist. "You said you'd take me home. What in god's name does the Manchester Mangler have to do with that?"

"Everything!" The Doctor whirled on Sam, eyes wide and nearly wet, hands outstretched like a man imploring reason from something mad and broken. "It's _everything_ to do with you, you stupid idiot!"

Sam found himself still and mute, at a loss for words in the face of righteous anger and inexplicable sincerity. His heart thudded in his chest, caged by ribs and muscle. His tongue weighed like lead in his mouth.

The Doctor's expression slid from fury into grief. He turned away.

"I'm sorry." He exhaled, sharp as glass. "This is all my fault. I'm so sorry."

The Doctor stood there, shoulders rigid, face raised to the faint stars above them. The nearby streetlamp cast harsh light on his features, etching every slight swell in his face, every bruise and cut, and Sam wanted -- he wanted to fix that. He wanted to step toward the Doctor, wanted to touch him, to heal him, to throw paint over the canvas of skin and reclaim it as his own.

He wanted to carve out his work on him and hurt anyone who tried the same.

"Oi! You lot stay out of that rubbish!"

Sam's eyes snapped up. A plump old woman stood in the back door of a nearby shop, stained apron over her front and grey hair done up in a bun. Sam felt dizzy, grounded by normalcy from something that -- from something. He shook slightly, anchoring himself to the badge in his hand as he pulled it out and approached her.

"Sam Tyler, DI. Could you--"

"Oh, no, I'm not falling for that nonsense, not this time!" The woman dried her hands on an old rag, red cheeks puffed out with indignation. "Not after you lot dug through my bins, left them scattered about--"

"Hold on." The Doctor scurried toward them. "Someone was searching the bins? These bins--" he gestured furiously, "right here?"

The woman leveled a glare at him "Few weeks back. Now, if you'll excuse me..."

Sam looked from the Doctor to the woman. "Wait, if you could answer--"

"Oh, no." The woman shook out her rag and scattered droplets on both of their fronts as she turned back toward her shop door. "You'll not be getting any more out of me, copper--"

"Why do you assume the police were involved in the search?" Sam frowned as he put his badge away.

The woman paused and scowled back at him. "Came out in a black coach, the whole lot. Gave some rubbish 'official' name when I asked it -- something 'bout a... a torchlight--"

"Torchwood."

The Doctor's eyes lit up. He grinned and bounced up and down on his feet. "Torchwood!"

The woman grit her teeth and stormed inside. "Knew not to blather on!"

She slammed the door behind her, but the Doctor was hardly concerned, manically cheerful when he'd just seconds ago been somber as death. He whirled around and grabbed Sam by the arm, then led him back to the car. "Come on! No time to lose -- not relatively, of course, but--"

Sam tugged out of the Doctor's grip, not at all filled with the same level of cheer as he settled into the driver's side. "What now?"

The Doctor swung in from his side and dropped into the passenger's seat. He might have been breathless if he didn't have the inhuman ability to speak nonstop for minutes at a time. "We've come upon something fan-- well, not 'fantastic,' exactly; quite the opposite, quite terrible, _but_ \--" he raised a finger, "--it's a starting point! A lead! You police officers like those, don't you? Like your leads. A lead, lead, lead... to lead us to..."

The Grenada's engine rumbled as it squealed away from the garbage. Sam focused on the road and shook his head. "Bloody hell, could you speak in a full sentence now and then?"

"Oh -- right, sorry." The Doctor cleared his throat and fidgeted in his seat, like a schoolboy too impatient to raise his hand. "What I mean is... we have a plan! And, ah, head east. Down this street."

Sam was thus far unaware of their "plan," or whether the Doctor ever functioned on anything other than pure impulse, but he followed the directions because what the hell else was he supposed to do? "So you know where to find these... 'Torchwood' people?"

"Nooo." The Doctor shook his head at least five times. "No, no, no, those Torchwood fellows -- they... ah, they don't like me much, I'm afraid. Insidious little bunch -- quite good at hiding, and I'm not sure where we'd look. But--"

The Doctor turned toward Sam, grinning wide.

"I know someone who might."

Sam's brow furrowed. He suspected that the Doctor was leading him in circles, but what Sam had said earlier was true. They couldn't go back to the station, and -- if Sam was perfectly honest with himself -- he doubted he could go back to his life here at all. And it wasn't a big loss, if the Doctor's proof of the future held true, except then Sam thought about Annie sitting alone in the canteen, eyes held low as she poked at something she couldn't quite stomach to eat.

But he'd committed. He needed to do this. The definitive step. This world had stopped him before, and he wouldn't let it again.

"All right," Sam breathed. "Where to?"

Something hovered around the Doctor -- charged static, untapped potential, anticipation of something crackling in the air. He looked at the road and smiled.

"Percy Lane."

\---

The street was even more foreboding in the midnight hours. The buildings stood gloomy on their crumbling foundations and where the children had earlier been playing in the street, papers rustled against the curb. The moonless night abandoned the world to shadow, broken only by street lamps that flickered like dying sentries in the darkness.

As Sam turned off the ignition, he sensed a sort of finality to it, an intangible book-end. The Doctor, too, seemed to appreciate the gravity of the moment as he gazed through the windscreen at an old police box standing in front of them.

"There," the Doctor said. "That's where we're going."

Sam loosened his grip on the wheel and took a proper look at the thing. He only vaguely remembered passing it by earlier today and he still couldn't see much of it now.

At length, he let out a laugh, short and simple. "That phone box? So, this is... a Matrix-type escape?"

Rather than return the mirth, the Doctor creased his brow. He looked down at the footwell.

"Sam." He took in a breath. "This might be a bit... overwhelming."

"More than waking up in 1973? Than languishing in coma?" Sam regarded him with a weary smile.

The Doctor smiled back, but there was a strained quality to it. One of his eyes shut more than the other.

"I'm afraid so."

Here, in the car, surrounded by the quiet world around them, Sam could almost believe they were trapped in a microcosm of 1973 rather than the year itself, that perhaps outside his door was the world he knew, the world he loved, the world he longed to return to.

And maybe it was.

Sam let out a breath. He braced his arm against the car door, opened it to the street, and planted his heels on the cobblestone.

"I'm done with this place," he said. "I don't care what it takes."

He shut the door and let his eyes settle on the box, on its blue paint and hard edges, on the dull white sign hanging off it. He thought he remembered seeing one of these when he was younger, clear as a bell in his memory -- which was odd, he thought, since they'd been all but phased out even by this deplorable decade. But there it was, a thread of reminiscence, guiding his steps as the thing loomed closer and larger, beckoning, wanting, an old friend once forgotten.

Sam's hands shook. His footsteps quickened, like stardust on solar wind.

"I'm going home," he breathed.

"Would that be Kansas, then, Dorothy?"

Sam froze.

A man stepped out of the black void beside the box and into the circle of lamplight in front of it. His arms hung at his sides with relaxed poise, his shoulders sturdy, his footsteps solid and firm. From this distance, his demeanor might have looked the same as ever save for the pistol in his hand, save for when he raised his eyes and Sam felt like his heart might stop, punctured through by the force of his stare.

Behind Sam, the Doctor skittered to a halt.

Gene stood, silent. He brought up a fist and knocked against the box's side.

"Never been a police box on this back-arse patch of rot. Never would be, unless someone had the mind to mask a drop-off point, weapons locker -- bomb." Gene narrowed his eyes. "I know my city, you piece of mongrel shit, and this street better than most."

"You couldn't... That's not..." The Doctor shook his head in shock. "How did you..."

Gene's glanced at Sam, almost mildly. "Got him talking then, did you."

Sam was frozen in time, no breath, no words, no energy to form either. He grit his teeth and didn't know if it was from anger or loss, clenched a fist and didn't know if it was to hurt another or himself.

"Gene, you don't--" He was close. God, so _close_. "You don't understand."

"You're right." Gunmetal glinted against the Guv's glove as he pointed his pistol at the Doctor. "I don't."

Sam's desperation rocketed up his throat. He stepped forward and waved an arm in the air.

"I don't belong here! Fucking hell, I've never belonged here -- never, from the first day, right from the bloody beginning. Can't you see that? Are you so blind to keep me here? _Gene!_ "

Gene kept his eyes on the Doctor. He nodded down the street toward the hazy outline of the Cortina. "Get in the car, Sam."

Sam stood there, wide-eyed, panicked. "No!"

Gene shot a glance his way, small and deadly. "Did that sound like a question?"

"You can't do this." Sam pressed his hands to his head, dug his nails into his scalp. "God, no, you can't _do_ this--"

"Sam--" the Doctor stuttered.

"Shut your bastard face!" Gene shouted back.

Sam shook his head, shut his eyes, a crescendo in his ears -- respirator, breathing. In-out, in-out. Voices, speaking in soothing rhythm. _You've done well, Sam. It's right there, Sam. Don't lose him, Sam._

_What you really need is a doctor, Sam._

Sam's head snapped up. He launched himself forward, slammed to a stop, braced himself between Gene and the Doctor. He spread his arms wide.

Gene's grip on his gun tightened so hard he nearly shuddered. "I swear to God, Tyler, I'll--"

"You won't." Sam grit his teeth and shook his head, every muscle tense, every inch of skin cold as ice. "You didn't with Vic Tyler, and you won't now."

Something shifted in Gene's face. His voice came out a low mutter.

"Do you ever hear yourself, you miserable bastard."

Sam stared back at him, shaking and breathing, more frightened than he'd ever been and more brave than he'd ever needed. He heard the Doctor move behind him, and Sam steeled himself, stepped sideways. He sidled slowly toward the blue box, eyes fixed on Gene all the while.

"You didn't tell anyone, did you? That I'd gone."

Gene kept the gun trained on him in stony silence.

Sam exhaled. "Didn't want a ruckus. Didn't want them knowing how cracked I really am, didn't want them to lock me up or start a shoot-out--"

"You're my DI," Gene breathed through gritted teeth. "Maybe you don't know what that means, but I bloody well do."

Sam felt the weight in his stomach again, leaden and broken. _This isn't real_ , he told himself as a gust of wind grazed the back of his neck, as his shirtsleeve brushed the edge of his wrist and his heel hit a crack in the pavement. _This isn't real._

His back had gotten so near the police box that he could almost feel it, tugging him closer, a warm hum pulsing and thrumming through his bones.

"I need to go home," he said.

Gene looked back at him, horribly still. "Where's this, then?"

Sam heard the Doctor fiddle with something. A latch turned and a door creaked open behind him. Gene's gaze moved somewhere past Sam's shoulder.

His shoulders went rigid. His eyes widened. His pistol slowly lowered.

"What the fuck are you," he whispered.

"Sam," the Doctor said.

Sam felt a hand on his shoulder, drawing him in like the tide, gentle, steady, unyielding. Sam stepped backward, over a threshold, unable to look away from Gene.

Sam swallowed. "I'm sorr--"

The door slammed shut in front of him.


	6. I: Iron Man | iv

iv.

_nobody wants him_   
_he just stares at the world_   
_planning his vengeance_   
_that he will soon unfold_

\---

The next thing Sam heard was a loud whirr.

The next thing he saw, as he turned around, was the full extent of how utterly cracked he was.

"Bloody Jesus," he said.

"Right, yes, it's bigger on the inside." The Doctor grinned from where he gripped a lever that was connected to a console, that was connected to a machine, that was connected to a massive glowing pillar in a massive glowing room that towered over Sam's head like a fucking cathedral.

Sam stumbled backward. His back hit the door.

And then the room around him rumbled, and quaked suddenly, with so much force that Sam tripped away from the wall. He groped for something to hold to, but as soon as he grabbed onto one of the room's strange, curved supports, the ground shook violently again and threw him off his feet and onto his back.

"Ow," he said from the floor.

Sam heard the Doctor flick another switch and then rush over the platform with metallic clangs. "Oh, no, no, don't do that!"

"Do what?" Sam sucked in a breath. The ceiling looked even higher from here.

"Not you." A pair of hands grabbed him under his arms and sat him up. The Doctor's voice echoed round the room, as if he was purposely directing it outward. "In fact, you, Sam Tyler, are an honored guest and it's our duty to make you feel welcome."

 _Oh, good_ , Sam thought, _my delusion's madder than I am._

The Doctor patted him on the shoulder and crouched next to him. "Sorry 'bout that -- she can be a bit, ah... moody."

Sam stretched his back and winced. "She?"

"The TARDIS," the Doctor said, as if that explained anything. A moment passed, and it felt strangely awkward, strangely silent, before the Doctor looked away and added, "My ship."

"Oh." Sam gave the room a second-over, because the once-over hadn't been nearly enough. "Your... as in a..."

"TARDIS -- that's 'Time and Relative Dimension in Space,' so, ah, we're not in 1973 anymore, if that's what you're asking." The Doctor beamed, and for a moment, Sam thought that perhaps he really was trapped in a horrible _Back to the Future_ knock-off, cast as the oblivious teenager beside a wild, harebrained, complete nutter -- well, doctor.

Sam shook his head and tried hard not to push away said nutter as he helped Sam to his feet. The ship -- TARDIS -- emitted another little rumble akin to an indignant protest before it went still again. Sam blinked and tried for the hundredth time not to reject the fantastical reality in front of him as he turned toward Doctor in mixed parts hope and dread.

"So, then... where are we?"

The Doctor's smile, if possible, grew wider. "Would you like to see?"

Sam nodded, because yes, he wanted to see. Yes, he needed to know. Yes, he had to be certain he hadn't left behind everything in that stupid, terrible year for nothing.

"All right." The Doctor strode past Sam to the ship's door, white and almost absurdly mundane against the curved, golden wall. "But let me warn you--"

"Show me."

The Doctor bounced on his heels before he reached forward and swung the door open.

Tension drained from Sam's body. He might have run out of air. His brow unfolded as his arms fell to his sides. He felt cold and warm all at once, both far away from home and the closest he'd ever been.

"Beautiful, isn't it." The Doctor's voice drifted into Sam's awareness, soft and wondrous. "The Lassevarian Nebula, on the fifth hand of the Constellation Sharanicus -- a birthplace for stars, planets..."

Sam stepped toward the door's threshold, toward the brilliant clouds that stretched like a web of colors over the blackness of space. Dazzling stars freckled the celestial swirl, lit up in white and gold, blazing in the dark. Sam could almost feel their heat on his face.

"We used to look up at these," the Doctor said, quiet. "Back home."

Sam's hand found the doorframe. Something caught in his throat.

"I never said goodbye."

Sam heard the Doctor turn toward him. He kept his own gaze fixed on the points of light as they blurred into a wet, hazy glow.

"Annie, in the canteen. I never said goodbye."

Sam watched for a moment longer and then groped for the edge of the door. He shut it with a slow, shuddering click and leaned forward, pressed his forehead against it. He closed his eyes and tried not to feel the horrible heat down his cheeks.

\---

The Doctor told Sam to get some sleep, so he did. Exhausted, bone-deep, dreamless sleep, interrupted only by sudden jolts of disorientation when his body noticed he was in a decent bed rather than the usual terrible one. A more-than-decent bed, in fact, in a more-than-decent bedroom adjoined to a bathroom and wardrobe, because apparently domestic considerations were also included in the 'bigger-on-the-inside' blueprints of the TARDIS.

Not that Sam found much comfort in this. He woke up feeling more numb than rested, and he spent the first forty minutes of his morning staring up at the ceiling and replaying scenes in his head. Annie smiling at him in the canteen. Gene glaring him down on the street. Sam wondered if Annie knew what had happened to him yet and if Gene had been the one to tell her, but then he thought about trees falling when someone wasn't there to hear them and he pondered if that was possible -- to care so much about sodding existential trees that you couldn't bear the thought of losing them.

He finally got up, slogged to the bathroom, pissed, and stepped into the shower. The TARDIS -- quite spitefully, he thought -- couldn't seem to give him a proper balance of hot and cold, even as he finessed the knobs like a NASA engineer.

"Bloody hell did I ever do to you," he muttered.

The water immediately shifted to boiling.

Which was how Sam found himself half-soapy and all cross, shivering a bit as he shaved and rinsed out the rest of his hair in the sink. He stormed out to the bedroom with a towel round his waist, consumed by pessimism over what kind of space-themed clothing awaited him in the wardrobe and whether or not it'd be worse than bell-bottoms and flared collars, but as he thrust the thing open, he was accosted by something so entirely normal that for a moment his mind blanked completely.

Modern attire -- suits, shoes, button-up shirts, trim t-shirts -- same sizes and styles as the ones Sam himself had worn back in 2006. Back home.

Sam found the edge of a suit jacket in his hand, soft and sleek, suspended on a hanger. He held it a moment, then let his eyes wander to the hodgepodge pile of discarded clothes that lay at the foot of the bed. Corduroy red, Cuban tan. Yellow stripes and black, faded leather.

Sam's hand tightened on the jacket.

Trousers. Belt. A starched shirt that caught his eye. He pulled them on, buttoned and buckled, hands shaking from a routine he hadn't properly felt in months. He reached for a tie, stupidly, and by the time he pulled on a suit jacket and turned toward the wardrobe mirror, he saw a reflection he hadn't known since the day he'd hit the tarmac off the A57.

Behind him, the door opened. Sam winced and straightened his tie.

"Morning, Doctor. Come to check on your patient?" He turned around, ready to launch into a tirade about the broken shower and his broken life and a thousand other things -- and then he stopped.

The Doctor stood in the doorway, fingers tight against the doorframe, gaze locked on Sam like he'd come face-to-face with a ghost.

Sam's frustration dwindled to a weak retort. "If it's soap in my hair you're staring at, you've your moody ship to blame."

The Doctor blinked, bewildered, before smiling with unsettling ease. "Oh -- sorry, was I...? You look nice, is all. In a suit."

Sam wondered, surreally, if now that he'd escaped the seventies, he could stop judging people's actions by seventies societal norms. Because while several words could describe how the Doctor was looking at him right now, the first one that came to mind required a rather progressive outlook.

Sam rubbed the scratchy shirt label at the back of his neck. He coughed.

The Doctor cleared his throat in return. "Right -- ah. Coffee?" He ran a hand through his upright hair and Sam noticed that his bandages from yesterday had vanished, along with most of the bruises. "I've got some remarkable coffee, right from the jungles of New Brazil--"

"That sounds fine," Sam mumbled. Really, it wasn't hard right now to see that nothing was fine, but unlike Sam, the Doctor didn't seem to understand the psychological ramifications of leaving behind any semblance of civilization or sanity.

As if to prove Sam's point, the Doctor grinned, twirled on his foot, and headed out the door. "Right! Novo Brasil Dark Roast, right up!"

Sam frowned. He marched after the Doctor and stopped at the bedroom's threshold, hand braced against the doorframe. "Wait, Doctor, about taking me home--"

"Coffee first!" The Doctor waved as he strode down the curved hall.

The Doctor's pinstripes disappeared down the corridor and Sam's stomach lurched. He shifted awkwardly in the clothes that should have comforted him and yet felt alien against his skin, drummed his fingers on the doorframe that separated the ordinary bedroom and the mad ship beyond it.

Sam remembered, with renewed clarity, his own confused anger over the blank-paper badge, his own untempered fear in the cellblock. He wondered if this so-called "Doctor" was having him on, if instead of nearing the surface of his coma fantasy, he was instead drowning in it. Sam wondered if it might have been better to listen to Gene back on Percy Lane -- Gene Hunt, who'd never led Sam down a winding trail of bread crumbs and promised a light around the corner. Who'd barreled through Sam's world and blown it to pieces, but never twisted it, never lied about it. Never made it out to be more than it was.

He'd been a good friend, Gene.

Sam closed his eyes. He leaned his head against the wall.

_All in your head. All in your head._

His fingers drummed harder against the doorframe. For a moment, he didn't hear the mobile ring.

Sam's eyes snapped open. They wandered to his leather jacket, lying at the foot of the bed.

He shot bolt upright, rushed to the jacket, and shoved a shaking hand in its pocket. He yanked out the Doctor's mobile and stared at the caller ID on the lit-up screen.

"Doctor?" he called out, soft and flighty. "Doctor, your mobile..."

No answer. The phone rang again.

Sam swallowed. He faltered. He ran his thumb over the phone's bright green "SEND" button for several seconds.

Then he pressed down and raised it to his ear.

"Hello?"

Silence. Sam had forgotten how little crackle there was on modern phones. He cleared his throat. "Hello, is--"

"Why do you have this phone."

The voice was young, female, and cold. So cold that Sam stood in silence, focused solely on the inexplicable, suffocating dread that seeped from his lungs to his gut.

The woman spoke again. "What have you done with him?"

Sam swallowed. "I don't--"

"The Doctor. Where the hell is the _Doctor?"_

Sam raised his eyes to see the Doctor standing in the bedroom doorway, stone-still, coffee mugs clutched in either hand.

They crashed to the floor as the Doctor sprinted at Sam, as he snatched the mobile from his fingers. Sam tried, stupidly, to tell him, "the ID said 'Martha'..." but the Doctor was already turning away, already pacing across the room, already babbling into the receiver.

"I can explain -- no, I didn't -- listen, just listen! I know what you're thinking, but it's not -- it's just..."

The Doctor's jaw tightened on a precipice between fury and despair. He shot a horrible glare at Sam, something between disdain and indignation and _how could you do this to me._ Sam was for a moment staring into that nebula again, feeling so small next to it, so unworldly, so very out of his depth.

Sam heard a tinny yell from the phone. The Doctor turned away. "Martha, it's under control. I'm _fine_ \-- he's..." The Doctor paused, and Sam glanced at the spilled coffee as it seeped into the carpet. He couldn't help but think of the blood stains on the Mangler's crime scenes.

"I'm fine," the Doctor repeated. "Just some unexpected difficulties, but -- well, if you'd like, I could meet you and Jack together, let you know what..." He trailed off, then slapped a hand to his face. "Yes! Oh, yes -- with both of you, we can get to the bottom of this right away -- yes, _right_ away, I promise."

The Doctor hung up and swung around to grab Sam's arm and yank him toward the door. "Come on, then!"

Sam wrestled out of the Doctor's grip, shifting from shock to anger as he followed him out to the hall. "Who was that?"

"Old companion of mine," the Doctor replied.

Just a few more yards and the Doctor threw open a door that dumped them into the ship's massive control room. Sam stumbled from the disorienting inconsistency of it all as the Doctor skipped to the console and flipped a switch, turned a dial, threw levers this way and that.

Sam grabbed the nearby railing and squeezed. "Are your 'companions' all so friendly?"

"Yes, mostly." The Doctor grinned, either because Sam's sheer scathing tone had blown right over his head or he was trying very hard to pretend it had. The TARDIS shook and rocked, but quite less than it had earlier, only jostling Sam about and aggravating his bloody scratchy collar a bit more.

The room went still again. The Doctor hit a few keys and a screen blinked with the words "LEVEL 5 LOCKDOWN" as he spun on his heel to face Sam. "Right, then. I won't be long."

Sam narrowed his eyes. "Won't be long where?"

The Doctor grabbed his coat off one side of the console and threw it over his shoulders as he headed toward the door. "Out!"

"You said you'd take me home."

The Doctor stopped midway through straightening his coat. His shoulders deflated as he turned around.

"It's complicated," he said. He almost looked ashamed.

Sam gripped the railing tighter. "You're visiting 'Martha' easily enough."

"Sam, it's..." The Doctor bit his lip and looked away. "Where I'm going, right now... it's not somewhere you want to be."

"I want to be out of here."

"Sam." The Doctor looked back at him, and this time Sam found his own expression wavering under his intensity, his certainty. "Trust me."

Trust him. Trust a liar and a lunatic, a sham police officer with all questions and no answers, a madman who flitted around in a box made of impossibility. Trust the man who'd upturned everything Sam hadn't realized he believed in, who'd made everything seem terrible and small, who'd touched Sam's tough, gritty world and made it wooden and broken.

"Everything was fine," Sam breathed, "before _you_."

The Doctor's certainty fell away to nothing. He turned toward the door.

"I know." He paused and gripped the handle, fingers bony and pale, figure overshadowed by the TARDIS wall. After a long moment, he breathed out and pulled the door open.

"Kitchen and bathroom should be open to you, along with your room. Just... relax, Sam. Stay inside."

The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS and into the light, but as he shut the door behind him, Sam didn't -- couldn't -- yell after him. Instead, he found himself frozen, fingertips cold as his mind shuddered back to the crime scene two days ago.

 _"Don't stay inside,"_ the voice on the phone had said. _"He'll tell you to stay inside."_

\---

The door was locked. Naturally.

Sam grit his teeth and rattled the thing, deceptively loose on its hinges. He wondered how the damn ship had prevented him from getting sucked into the vacuum of space last night. A force field of some sort? That same... what was it? Trans-dimensional technology? Christ if it even mattered right now, while he was stuck here, alone, in a humming control room with only his mind's grandest visuals and barest hints to guide him.

 _"Don't stay inside."_ Bleeding hell. Like Sam should have ever listened to that wanker of a lunatic, that two-faced bastard. He should have known better, should have been...

_"I told you to be careful with him."_

Sam closed his eyes. He'd listen to Annie next time, and that single thought gave him so much vertigo that he nearly sank to his knees.

He leaned on the door, caught his breath, then stepped away from it. He clenched his fists and turned to face the giant hexagonal console at the center of the room.

He marched toward it.

"Right," he muttered, "let's see what you can do."

Sam stopped on the metal grating a few paces away from the contraption's single black screen and intermittently flexed his fingers. As far as time machines went, this one didn't appear especially elegant -- multiple jerry-rigged systems hooked to one another, wires and circuits wound across controls that varied from laughably obsolete to unrecognizably futuristic. Sam imagined he'd have to be Scotty or Han Solo to make any sense of it, but if this truly was a creation of his mind, then perhaps pop culture and basic technological know-how were all he needed to crack it.

"On switch. Tell me you have a sodding on switch." He stepped forward and pulled the nearest lever, but got nothing but a dull thud as it hit a locking mechanism. He scowled further and jabbed at a button, but it stayed stubbornly in place as well.

He shifted his weight, feeling vaguely -- okay, extremely -- ridiculous.

"Activate," he tried.

Nothing. Sam's mouth twisted.

"Turn on?"

The TARDIS console regarded him with its usual drone. Sam tapped his foot, then moved to another section of the console -- and rubbed the damn collar against his neck in the process.

Sam hissed with sudden ire. As if things weren't sufficiently terrible yet, as if the entire bloody universe wasn't having enough of a laugh at his expense. His hand shot up and groped for the ill-placed tag, but as he tugged it down--

He paused.

Sam pressed a nail against what felt like a loose thread next to the irritant label corner, along with some other material protruding behind it. He tore at the fabric again and pulled the collar to the side of his neck. One more rip and he got the label off.

Something fell against his shoulder.

Sam groped for the small weight and held it out where he could see it. The thing looked like paper, one inch across, folded up around something solid and held together by a thread tied round it.

He turned it over in his hands and saw writing, bold and urgent.

APPLY TO TARDIS WIRING.

And then he stopped.

His eyes found the full-stop and stayed there. It took a moment for him to process why he couldn't move, why his heart had stopped along with his breath.

Because normally that wasn't a strange thing, to read your own handwriting.

Sam ripped open the paper to find a small, see-through circuit board with shallow spikes on one side, glimmering under the TARDIS' warm light. Underneath that, in Sam's rushed print:

GET OUT. NOW.

Sam slammed a hand to his mouth. He shut his eyes. Bile clenched in his throat.

_Don't stay inside. Don't stay inside._

His eyes snapped open. He stuffed the paper in his pocket and grasped the circuit board between his fingers as he leaned one hand on the console's edge. With the other, he laid the circuit board against a bundle of wires and then, swallowing hard, pressed it against them.

White fire shot up the TARDIS' main column. Sam staggered backward as he watched the tiny circuit board glow to blinding, then zap streaks of lightning down the console's cables and into the machine's inner workings. For a moment, nothing happened.

Sam let out a breath.

Then, the black screen lit up. The words "LEVEL 5 LOCKDOWN" fritzed in and out as circular patterns twirled across the interface with frantic speed, distorted by static, flickering intermittently with strange letters and code.

The TARDIS jolted and whirled around Sam, and he let out a yell as he slammed against the nearby railing. He wrapped an arm around the metal bar as the ship groaned against the overload and rocked back and forth like a barge at sea. The console, recently lifeless, crackled with sparks. Levers and dials turned and shook. Sam shut his eyes against the chaos, clenched his jaw and nearly bit through his own lip from the force of it--

And then, the TARDIS shuddered to a stop so suddenly that it threw him off the railing and to the floor.

For a moment, Sam couldn't feel anything but each sharp breath he sucked in. His whole side throbbed, cheek pressed raw against the cold grating. His ears pounded. The scent of melted plastic and metal seared through his nostrils.

Something clicked. Creaked.

Sam's eyes fluttered open. For a moment, he couldn't make out anything but the glow of the column overhead, but slowly, he managed to focus on the white door across the room.

It was ajar.

Sam coughed. He pressed his palms against the floor and pushed himself up. He blinked again and then used the railing to drag himself to his feet.

He stood straight and stumbled forward. And then walked. And then ran.

He burst out the door with a thud and felt air on his face, crisp and bitter. Nearby, a few lamp posts cast scant light from the opposite side of a chainlink fence. Some of their glow filtered into the area around him, revealing upturned rubble and dirt, concrete mixers and disused pipes. A construction site.

Something in Sam dropped at the memory of where he'd first woken up after his accident, and he stepped away from the TARDIS' threshold to turn around, shakily, and take in the rest of his surroundings. The first thing to catch his eye was the TARDIS itself, door hanging wide open, bright and cheerful and offering a glimpse into its impossibly large interior.

It occurred to Sam that someone's mind might grind to a halt at seeing such a thing. It occurred to him that Gene's probably had.

Sam swallowed and leaned forward to shut the damn thing, then diverted his attention outward again. A wooden barrier around the chainlink kept him from seeing whatever was outside the construction site, but he could hear a car rush past every now and then, along with the far-off sound of someone conversing in English.

Manc English.

Sam looked up and saw that the dark sky above him offered no brilliant dust clouds or would-be supernovas, just the twinkling glimmer of the few stars that made it through his city's haze, plain and simple and familiar.

Back to square one, then.

Sam closed his eyes and leaned back against the TARDIS' side. He stood there and inhaled. Exhaled.

He wondered how he was supposed to explain all of this once he trudged back into the station. He wondered how many punches to the gut he'd have to take from Gene, how many days of tense silence from Annie. His chest tightened. God, Annie. He might have only been gone a night, but she'd be gutted by now from whatever horrible delivery had gone along with the Guv's briefing, and she'd yell at Sam, probably -- cry at him, maybe -- but at least he'd see her again. He'd have time to tell her things he wouldn't have dared before today, and maybe he actually would, when she wasn't so cross.

If Sam wasn't suspended and jailed by then.

He opened his eyes as he connected the dots. That little note must have been a mental failsafe. Get-out-of-jail-free card, right from his sodding subconscious. "Stick to your Night University and your terrible little girls and be thankful for it." No more time-travelers. No more blue boxes. Just Sam, and the voices, and his mum pleading from the telly that he could wake up from his personal hell if he just tried hard enough.

Sam pushed away from the TARDIS. Another car zoomed past on the opposite side of the fence -- far quicker than any seventies car ought to safely go, Sam thought with a resigned sigh. Some hooligan and his girlfriend, probably -- blaring Britney or Beyoncé or some other rubbish pop out the window. Something about kissing a girl.

Sam's head snapped up.

He ran at the fence. Tripped. Kept going. Hit the gate, shoved, but -- it was locked. Locked. He couldn't open it. He needed to open it, needed to--

His eyes shot across the area. There. Gap in the chainlink.

Sam rushed at it, shoved away the wooden boards. They slid aside and he slammed through.

His shoes hit pavement. He winced as he got the full view of the streetlamp, and--

A covered bus stop. Metal, plastic. A flashy movie advert on one side with a Batman logo, all blue and black, with drop-shadow text. Printed flyers covered the other side -- lost cats, guitar lessons, all titled in Helvetica.

Helvetica.

Sam stumbled. His shoulder hit the lamppost.

He laughed.

\---

Several minutes passed before Sam could walk straight, drunk on elation, giddy on triumph.

Home.

The street was quiet save for the odd passing car, small and rounded and _modern_. Citroëns and Hondas instead of hard-edged Leylands. New Minis instead of old ones. Sam trailed his hand against the wooden barrier round the construction site, reveling in the ridged texture, the solid rattle it made against the chainlink.

It must have been late, judging from how none of the sleek storefronts on the opposite side of the street were lit up. Only one lone figure stood on the pavement, loitering at the corner, hair dyed, face riddled with piercings. Some misfit kid, but Sam could hardly give a damn, because the punk was standing round and texting on his mobile like it was the most normal thing in the world.

Sam approached and read the street sign. Percy Lane. He'd moved in time, but not in location, it seemed, and bloody hell had the neighborhood moved up in the world. Still, despite the bus stop, there didn't appear to be transport at this hour and it'd be a long walk to Sam's flat. God, his flat...

The punk glanced up from his texting. He twisted his mouth. "Oi. Do I know you?"

Sam ignored him as his mind raced through possibilities. What about Maya's flat, or the station? Maybe his mother. Mum lived west of here, didn't she? Just a mile or so?

"I'm sure I've seen you," the punk muttered. "On the telly."

 _In cell detention, more like it,_ but Sam kept it to himself as he turned to the punk and said, "Can I borrow your mobile?"

"Piss off," the punk hissed.

"I'm a police officer," Sam bit back.

"Right," the punk scoffed. "And I'm Winston bloody Church-- hey..." The punk took a wide-eyed step back and raised a finger. "That's it -- you're the bloody--!"

"I'm Winston Churchill?" Sam deadpanned.

"Get 'way from me -- don't want any trouble!" The Punk stumbled backward, then turned and ran.

"Oi!" Sam cried. "Oi, stop!" He reached under his coat but staggered to a stop when he couldn't find the hard outline of his badge.

The punk ran around the corner and out of sight as Sam realized he'd run out of the TARDIS ill-equipped -- no ID, no cash, no coins for a public phone. He'd left his wallet in his pants, his radio in his jacket, his St. Christopher on the TARDIS sink counter.

He tried to ignore the sinking feeling he got from that.

Sam turned in the direction of his mum's flat with dogged resignation and started walking. Best like this, anyway, to soak in a breath of dirty modern air as he passed by the bus stop and drank in the hallmarks of modern consumerism, that same glossy Hollywood poster--

He stopped in his tracks. Re-read the release date under the big Batman logo. He let the over-stylized font sink in a bit longer, because that couldn't...

"2008?" Sam whispered.

\---

Sam was no longer giddy by the time he arrived at his mum's flat.

Two years he'd been gone, if he could believe that movie poster, and he had a sinking suspicion he shouldn't. He'd lost perspective in his elation at entering a modern world, his logic and sense. He needed to rethink this.

He'd been lying in a hospital bed in 2006. Was still lying in one, most likely, unless hospitals had made a habit of dumping coma patients in abandoned construction sites. This must have been his mind's next torture -- his almost-reality transplanted to the modern world, just to really, truly dig the knife in.

And it was working. Sam felt trapped at an impossible impasse shaped by hope and fear, because he wanted this to be real. He did. Except it'd be a devil's bargain, and would require Sam to accept things like time travel and space travel and a man who knew more about his life than anyone rightfully should. It would require contemplation of how that hidden note in his collar could exist and why it had taken him here. It would require the possibility that Sam had left more behind in 1973 than a handful of sepia phantoms.

So he was still asleep. Still the dreamer, falling, twisting, clutching at nothing, because that, at least, he could live with.

Sam swallowed a dry lump in his throat as he stepped off the flat block's landing and walked down the hall to a familiar number. He stopped and pressed his hand against the door in front of him.

He wondered if he could let himself be fooled this once. Just for a minute. Just long enough to keep him whole. Maybe his mind had given this to him because it was something he'd die without.

He peered down and saw light spilling onto the hall carpet from beneath the door.

Sam inhaled and raised his hand. He knocked.

Movement inside. Soft rustles, footsteps. Sam's heart pounded, though this time there was something more to it -- deep, steady, faraway. Like drums.

He heard someone on the other side of the peephole. A pause.

Sam stepped back as the door slammed open. For a moment he couldn't breathe.

"Mum?"

She was elderly, wrinkled, and would have been beautiful if not for the dark circles under her eyes, the stress lines crossing her face. Not so much worse than Sam remembered her, and he would have smiled if not for the look she gave him -- numb, weary. Resigned, almost.

"I told you not to come here," she said.

Sam reeled. This wasn't right. This was strange, ugly, alien. His chest ached. "Mum, it's..."

"I'm not your mum. Get it through your head." She nodded in the curt way she did when she was ready to shut the door on someone. This was something Sam Tyler knew about his mother, so he knew to jam his foot between the wall and the door, to grit his teeth as she tried to slam it.

"Mum, what are you--"

"If you've come to offer condolences, off you go," she got out, sharp and bitter. "'Fixed point in time' means nothing to me, not when my Sam--"

"It's me," Sam pleaded. "I'm right here."

"No," his mother said, voice so frigid that Sam's lungs shriveled up under his ribs. "Never. You'll never be my Sam, you monster, don't care what that Doctor did to you--"

Sam's heart stopped.

"Doctor?"

"Have you forgotten him too, now? How convenient that must be," she whispered, scathing, "to forget and remember whatever you wish while the rest of us live with what you've done."

Sam shook his head, eyes warm and wet.

"I don't know." He felt a tremble in his throat, in his voice. "I don't know what's happening. I'm sorry. I don't know."

Sam's mum looked back at him like he was something worse than a stranger. Like he wasn't someone she'd carried to bed, walked to school, taught to bicycle, watched soar in Academy, held in her arms and said, _"I'm so proud of you, Sam. I've always been so proud."_

"Do you really not remember?" she murmured.

Sam choked on his words. "I don't... I just..." He gestured in futility over his shoulder. "I came back. From there."

"There?"

"Back there. The Doctor. His box. He took me..." This was too much. Sam's head pounded. _All in your head, all in your head, things we can do, don't stay inside--_

"You're from before."

Her voice muffled the din like a blanket, heavy and soft. When Sam raised bleary eyes to meet hers, she looked back at him, face shocked, mouth slack. "This is what he was trying to..."

"Who?" Sam asked, but instead of answering, his mum looked away and fidgeted with her hands. Like when she mulled over something. When she steeled her resolve.

Finally, she looked back to him.

"DI Tyler?" she asked.

Sam nodded, because what else could he do. What else could he ever do but watch, and nod, and stand like a paper cut-out while his world tore him to shreds.

His mum bit her lip. At length, she stepped out of the doorframe and motioned for him to come in.

Sam followed her lead, automatic and numb. His mum's flat looked the same -- placement, colors, framed photographs. It only heightened the sense of unreality, the horrible sick humor.

She closed the door behind him. Her voice shook. "Would you like some tea?"

Sam didn't answer. He couldn't bear to -- his mum, asking him about tea like they were proper fucking British acquaintances. His mum, who apparently knew about the Doctor in this nightmare world. His mum, conspiring with Sam's own personal boogeyman.

His mother stood for a moment and then walked to the kitchen. "I'll make us some tea," she said, as flighty and frightened as Sam felt.

Sam's gaze wandered to the sofa -- an old sofa, the one he'd urged his mum to replace. But she liked it, she'd said. She liked the smell of it, so there it was, just like Sam had known it would be.

"What's going on?" Sam sounded like a ghost, thin and transparent, something apart from the world.

The clatters in the kitchen stopped. Sam imagined her standing there, clutching a mug in that nervous way of hers. "I'll put the kettle on."

Like the Doctor and his coffee, Sam thought. It seemed a number of people didn't want to tell him things.

Sam heard the kitchen clatters start again and let his feet wander further into the living room. He once again took in the sheer familiar surroundings, the vase of orchids on the side table, the rack of shoes by the door. The blue-and-white curtains shifting by the window, the faded photo frame on the mantle.

Sam found himself drawn to the frame despite the strange circumstances and his stinging eyes, the dread pooling down the walls of his stomach. He remembered the photo clearly, his mother's pride on display for any visiting neighbor to see -- a snapshot from when Sam had graduated Academy, with him in full police regalia and his mother beside him, smiling.

Except it wasn't.

"Who's that?" Sam whispered. He heard his mother walk up behind him, slow and steady. He let out a shuddering breath. "Who the hell is that?"

The man in the photo was blond, blue-eyed, and wore a suit and tie. He had a pointed chin and dimpled cheeks. Sam's mum was hugging him and smiling.

"That's my son," she said, almost gently. "That's my Sam."

"No." Sam shook his head, choked out a laugh. "No, no, that can't -- I should be in uniform..."

"He told me about that. My Sam, a policeman."

Sam turned. His mum stood still, staring at the ground, hands clutched behind her back. This wasn't a gesture that Sam recognized, and neither were her words, distant and dream-like. "He told me my Sam would have been a policeman, if not for you. If you hadn't stopped Vic, that day at the wedding. If you hadn't saved that girl."

The wedding. Dad's escape. Annie's red dress. Sam's four year-old self, asking a question, then walking back inside.

"But that didn't stop the accident," she continued with a slow breath. "That didn't stop him from ending up in coma. Didn't stop your Doctor from showing up at his bedside and taking what shouldn't be touched."

"What... what are you saying?" Sam bit inside his cheek. He turned back to the mantle and saw more gut-wrenching imitations -- his fifth birthday party, grammar school commencement, casual football with college friends. Personal things. Important things. In every one, replaced by a stranger. "That's... this is who I am."

"No, DI Tyler," his mum murmured behind him. "You're what the Doctor did with my Sam's memories, when he strung them up and mixed them about. You're something made up. You aren't real."

 _All in your head, all in your head._ Clanging, rattling through his skull. It didn't go away. It never went away.

"I owe you thanks for one thing," his mum continued, a whisper in the storm. "For protecting my son that day. But that doesn't undo what came after. That doesn't undo what you are."

"I don't understand." Sam grit his teeth, heaved in a sob, tried to blot out the sound in his head. He pressed a clenched fist to the mantle's side and turned toward her. "Mum, it's _me_ \--"

She shoved.

That's what he registered first, before his back hit the mantle. Before he got the full view of her face, white and harrowed, before he saw her hand on the knife. Before he felt the warmth down his belly.

She let go, stepped back. Sam stumbled and clutched for the shelf, the armchair. Books fell. The chair toppled. He thudded against the floor and something shattered in him, fragile, deeper than bone. The woman who wasn't his mother loomed over him.

"I have to stop you," she said, so soft. "I have to."

Shudders inside him. Aches and throbbing. He gasped for air like a fish, lost, drowning, grotesque. His shirt clung to his skin as copper drained into his mouth, sharp and red. Like on the tarmac, that day -- in pain, afraid. Alone.

The drums grew louder. His knuckles twitched against the carpet.

One, two, three, four.

One, two, three--

The door slammed open.

In Sam's fading periphery, his not-mother's head shot up.

"What are you doing here?" she whispered.

Shoes hit the floor. Sam felt a knee against his side. Torn cloth near his ear, then pressure on the wound. Sam could hardly see. Only his hand moved, a parody of rhythm.

One, two, three, four.

"He's from before." His not-mother's voice shouted over the fog. "We can stop it. Before any of it even happens, we can stop it!"

Sam coughed. Rattled. His hand spasmed. One, two, three, four.

A palm enclosed his wrist and held it to the carpet, so gentle. Sam's hand went still under its touch.

Sam's not-mother heaved in a breath.

"But you know that, don't you," she finally uttered. "You did this. You're the one who sent him back. All this time, it was you."

More pressure on the wound. Sam's teeth chattered. The hand on his wrist moved to the side of his neck, then the back of it. Sam shivered, not from pain, but from the hand's fingers. Three warm and the other two ice-cold. Metal.

His not-mother's voice was thunder, distant and terrible. "You'd let the world burn. For him."

The fingers pressed harder, where Sam's skull met his spine. Something sparked from the tips of them and Sam's mind froze, suspended in air--

And then exploded with light, color, sound. Whirling and twirling, a flurry of sensations too quick to feel, like someone was searching, sorting, spinning a synapse rolodex in his head. Pausing, sometimes, with difficulty, but surging forward, a torrent unchained, winding through dusty rooms, obliterating cobwebs, scattering knick-knacks.

The surge stopped. Sam took in a breath that wasn't a breath, felt cool water wrap around his ankles and drag him under. But Sam was ready for it, so calm, because the Other in his head was supposed to be here, had been here many times before. How else could it know where the walls were buried, so thick, untouched, unknown. Pounding, beating on the other side -- _let me out there, can't keep me caged, you'll pay for this_ \-- and the Other pausing, touching, and then--

Smash. But only one door, only a crack, and the Other dove deep, gripping Sam, strong and sure. Sam was frightened because he hadn't been here before, not in a long time. None of him wanted to go back, not even the huge parts, the bloated bits of him that choked him with their weight, that twisted and writhed and screamed like phantoms.

 _It's all right,_ the Other said, not with words but through certainty, full and whole. _I've got you._

Sam stood on a hill. Silver peaks jutted out of the horizon. Red grass rippled in an arid breeze as twin suns bathed his face.

He shivered as he felt roots spread out in the soil far below, growing in the pit of him, the soul of him, curling around him like the arms of a brother, like an anchor. They burst from the ground, wound into a trunk, shaded him with branches and leaves.

And then Sam rose, flew, soared through red skies and dark oceans, through the crack just before it closed again. And the Other held on to him, weaker than before. Like not all of it could come back.

 _I've got you,_ Sam said as they broke the surface.

\---

Sam's eyes fluttered. His chest throbbed.

A moving vehicle hummed around him. His vision focused, slow and hazy, on a mismatched hand grasping his arm. Two metal fingers dug into his skin, jointed with wires, grafted onto scar tissue next to their flesh-and-bone counterparts.

They felt smooth against his arm. Smoother when they brushed his cheek.

_I won't leave you. Promised that, didn't I?_

Sam closed his eyes. He nodded.

The hand relaxed against Sam's head. Fingers trailed through his hair like cloud wisps, light and gentle, leaving misty dreams in their wake. Sam drifted into one, cradled by a stranger's hand, by the thought that a single person in the vast stretch of space and time thought a thing like him worth saving.


	7. I: Iron Man | v

v.

_now the time is here_   
_for Iron Man to spread fear_   
_vengeance from the grave_   
_kills the people he once saved_

\---

"...too near him. Careful."

"Can you hear me, sir?"

Sam's jaw twitched against a hard surface. Hell. Must've dozed off during paperwork.

"I'm all right," he mumbled against his desk. It was good that Annie had found him before they went out to pub -- Guv might've left him for dead otherwise. He moved to sit upright--

And couldn't.

"Check the restraints," a voice said.

"I just did."

"Do it again."

Awareness slowly came to him. He inhaled and smelled disinfectant. His abdomen burst with dull pain. He squinted at a concrete ceiling, low and fluorescent. His back lay against a cold metal slab.

"Hello," said a voice.

His eyes wandered and refocused on a woman's face. Brown-eyed, freckled. Welsh lilt. Brow creased along the edge of a weary smile. "Hear me, do you?"

"I..." Sam tugged uselessly at something around his wrist. His throat went dry. "Where am I?"

"Somewhere safe. Sorry 'bout the precautions." The woman's smile waned, then grew again. "Could you tell me your name?"

The room was awfully quiet for a hospital. Sam swallowed. "My..."

"Your name," the woman repeated, with emphasis. "Please."

Sam closed his eyes. He saw images behind his lids -- locked doors and red grass. A strange hand. His mother's knife.

Drums.

"Sam," he gasped out, fists clenched against the restraints. "My name is Sam Tyler."

He felt a hand against his shoulder, heard relief in the woman's voice. "Hush -- you're all right, Sam. It's all right."

"Where am I?" Terror made Sam's voice stronger. "What the hell's going on?"

"Probably lying," said the voice behind her. Male. American.

The woman grit her teeth. "Does it look like he's lying?"

"Murdering psychopaths are pretty good actors, Gwen."

"Christ," Sam breathed, "can someone _tell_ me--"

"You think being human makes you entitled to anything," the man said, cold and seething. "That's cute."

Sam shut his eyes and tried to control his breathing -- control, because he had so little of it left, a motherboard overloaded, metal rivets undone, a comet careening through the atmosphere, burning and fading, stripped of each layer until nothing remained but molten rock and ashes.

"Come off it," the woman hissed. Her hand smoothed down the fabric over Sam's shoulder. "God, he's shaking."

"He'd better be," said the man.

Sam heard footsteps on tile along with a low voice. "Jack, they found the... uh, the police box. They're coming down now." 

"Thank god." The American stepped into Sam's view, garbed in slacks and suspenders, gait furious as he slammed through a reinforced glass door and into a concrete corridor. "Ianto, you stick to surveillance. Gwen, keep him talking. If he makes a single move, you take that gun--"

"I know." Sam felt the hand leave his shoulder, then craned his neck to watch the door click shut and lock with an ominous thud.

Sam heard two pairs of footsteps fade down the hallway. A distant door shut. After a moment, the woman sighed.

"I won't shoot you, just so you know."

Sam swallowed. "That's comforting."

"You must be frightened," she added. Sam laid his head sideways against the metal table and saw the woman sitting on the chair beside him. Despite her steady gaze, Sam couldn't help but notice her fidgeting hands. "I wish I could help, but I've only just learned all this too."

"Learned what?" Sam winced as another dull throb hit his insides. "Who are you?"

"Gwen Cooper," she said. "Torchwood."

"Torchwood? That's..." Sam tried to sit up on the slab and achieved only some frustrated chafing. "Is that why you lot kidnapped me? Because you work with the... the Doctor?"

"No." Gwen paused, cautious, and then continued. "Not as such, anyway. We handle alien activity the government isn't equipped to."

Sam blinked. For a moment, he forgot he was on a metal table, restrained, in a strange cold cell in a strange cold facility with nothing to ground him but the pain in his chest and the prickling hairs on his arms.

"Excuse me?" he squawked.

"Alien activity. After Big Ben, Canary Wharf..." Gwen paused and pursed her lips. "The last election."

Sam stared at her. "What the hell are you on about -- _aliens?_ "

Gwen frowned with disturbingly legitimate concern. "You don't know about..."

Sam let out a laugh, high and hysterical. "My mum stabbed me. _Stabbed_ me. Aliens -- god. I'm supposed to wrap my head around aliens?"

Laughter drained from his throat and left his abdomen searing. The room went quiet as his head hit the table and he bit down on his trembling lip.

"My mum stabbed me," he whispered.

His voice echoed back at him with stinging clarity. For a single moment, he wanted nothing more than to curl up on the table, bury his face in his arms, and sob out every injustice, every gaping, bleeding wound. But the chafing bands on his wrists and ankles denied him even that small luxury, and so he stared at the ceiling, a stone mask over a mess of broken shards, held together with nothing more than child's glue and peeling resolve.

_All in your head. All in your head._

"I'm so sorry." Gwen's voice rang with sincerity. It shouldn't have frightened Sam as much as it did.

"You don't even know me," he responded in monotone.

"You're right." Gwen exhaled. "But it was me your friend came to, and I suppose that counts for something."

Sam's head snapped back to her. "What friend?"

Gwen shook her head. "Didn't say -- just told me where the Doctor could find his... time box. Couldn't see him properly -- perception filter, Jack said. Anyway, was a bit more worried about you bleeding to death on my doorstep, wasn't I? "

"Right." Sam grit his teeth. "Sounds perfectly reasonable."

"He ran off before I could ask any questions." Gwen crossed her arms. "Whoever he was, he knew we were looking for you and that we could heal you quickly -- faster than hospital. He did the right thing."

It occurred to Sam that he was in a hell of a lot less pain than he should have been for such a recent injury. He clenched his fists, frustrated and impatient, more than a little unsettled. "You were looking for me? Why?"

Gwen didn't answer immediately. "I don't think it's my place to say."

Some kind of profound gravity weighed down her words and Sam lay silent in their aftershock. He tried to work through his confusion and grasp for something he could understand.

"That man," he finally said. "Did you see if his hands looked... normal?"

Gwen rubbed her head, as if it was taking a great deal of effort to recall any details. "Why wouldn't they be?"

"Try to remember," Sam asked. "Please."

Gwen's eyes scrunched a bit tighter. After a moment, she brought up her hand and folded down all but her ring finger and pinky. "These two, on his left hand... were they metal?"

Sam nodded, though he didn't know if it was with relief or gnawing fear. "Yeah, that's it. Metal fingers."

Gwen smiled, hopeful. "Do you know who it was, then?"

Sam looked back to the ceiling. "Not a bloody clue."

"Sam!"

He went still.

Running footsteps pounded down the hall, followed by two others. Despite the mixed gaits and argumentative voices, only one caught Sam's attention, only one drew his complete focus as it shouted demands at the rest.

"Open the cell."

"You know I can't do that," said the American.

"If he were a Time Lord again, I'd sense it immediately. Do you think I'd lie about that?"

"Would you?"

Sam kept his gaze fixed on the ceiling. _Time Lords, all dead. Time Lords, all lost._

One, two, three, four.

"He's right, Doctor," said a posh woman's voice, the same one from the mobile. "You can't know for certain, not when he was able to--"

"Open it, Jack."

"No."

"Wait--" Gwen's voice said over the growing drums. "I'll let you in."

"Gwen, don't--"

"I believe him," said Gwen, so young, so naive.

The door unlocked. Sam breathed, calm and even, as the Doctor's frantic hands grasped the restraints around his wrists, his ankles.

One, two, three, four.

"Sam," the Doctor said as he worked. "Sam, are you all right?"

Sam didn't answer. Instead, he glanced down at his hand, now free from the table. He flexed it, testing its movement and weight.

"Yes," Sam said. "I'm fine."

In Sam's peripheral vision, a frown crossed Gwen's face. Beyond her, Martha Jones stood with her arms tense at her sides. Jack's hand inched toward his holster.

"Good," the Doctor replied with a smile. He finished undoing the last strap on Sam's ankles. "Just need to get you back to the TARDIS, is all. The Time Vortex proximity should stave off the Chameleon's temporal dissonance for another hour or so, but if you stay here too long, you'll--"

Sam's hand shot up and grabbed the Doctor by the collar. He yanked him close, whipped him around, and slammed him down on the metal table.

"Got you," Sam whispered.

Jack's gun snapped up. Beside him, Martha clenched her fists.

"Get the hell off him!" she snarled.

Gwen stepped back, horrified. "Sam!" she exclaimed. It was strange how she kept using that name, how she kept staring at him like he shouldn't be so ugly.

"It's all right!" the Doctor shouted over the rest as he raised his hands in surrender. His Adam's apple bobbed as Sam's fingers pressed closer to his throat. "Sam, please listen--"

"I'm done listening," Sam spat in his face. He tapped out his rage on the Doctor's neck -- _one, two, three, four._ "I want answers."

"Sam--"

"It's all you, isn't it?" Sam laughed and he didn't know why. "All of it -- from the very beginning. My mum told me, you know. About the accident. She knew you."

The Doctor's face paled. Sam's smile stretched, Cheshire-wide. "Weren't expecting that, were you? I'm clever, Doctor. You forgot that I'm _clever._ "

The Doctor swallowed. "It's not what you think--"

"My mum -- she tried..." Sam drew in a breath and felt his teeth chatter. "She said I wasn't her son, that I'm something horrible, but that's not true -- that can't be true. What did you do to her?"

The Doctor exhaled slowly. _One, two, three, four._ He didn't say a bloody word, and that was the worst part, the worst thing he'd done. Chattering, babbling, always talking, always doing, except when Sam needed an answer -- when he needed him most.

One, two, three, four.

Sam's nails dug into the Doctor's neck, flush against the trembling muscle underneath. "What did you _do?_ "

"Please--" the Doctor choked.

"You don't have a mother!" Martha yelled, hands wide and furious. "You don't have a mother, you monster, so stop and get the hell off him!"

"Stay out of this," Sam growled.

_Stay out of this. Stay out of this._

"No." Martha stepped forward. "Never. We might've let you live, but you'll not take another life, never again."

"I haven't!" Sam yelled back. His eyes snapped up, wild, hands tight on shuddering skin. "I'm not a killer!"

_Not a killer. Not a killer._

"Then stop," the Doctor said.

Sam lowered his gaze and saw his hands, shaking where they'd loosened their grip on the Doctor's throat. The Doctor swallowed, his eyes fixed on Sam's with irrevocable focus, impossible pain. Like it hurt just to look at him. His hand pressed against the side of Sam's face, fingertips solid and real against his cheek, slick on faint tear trails.

"Master," he whispered. "It's all right."

"It's not," Sam choked back. "Nothing's right -- the drums, Doctor, I can't tell anymore--"

The Doctor's nails dug into his temple. "I know. Here, let me--"

Something exploded inside him. Red skies, silver mountains. The _tree--_

Sam shouted and staggered back, blinded. His hands scrabbled at a smooth, cold wall. His ears pounded -- _one, two, three, four._

A hand gripped the front of his shirt and slammed him into the wall. Jack's blurry visage came into view.

"Stay," Jack growled.

The Doctor sat on the table, wide-eyed. His hand hung in the air where it'd touched Sam's face, held in place as if by marionette strings.

"Who's been in your head?" the Doctor whispered.

Sam looked back at him, weak and weary.

"I don't know." He swallowed and raised his eyes to the ceiling. "I don't know anymore."

\---

Sam stared at the floor. Dull light fixture reflections bounced off the polished concrete.

It was a strange part of his surroundings to focus on, given the glowing column at the center of the room and the TARDIS, bright and blue next to it. More than that, better than that, were the tactile keyboards and paper-strewn desks that peppered the interior of Torchwood's HQ. These things should have been beautiful to Sam Tyler. They should have reminded him of where he ought to be.

Instead, the only comfort he found was in the worn leather jacket hanging from his shoulders, the corduroy around his legs. The Doctor had brought Sam's 1973 clothes to him after they'd changed him out of his blood-soaked suit, and Sam had put them on silently, stoically, pausing only to clench his St. Christopher's in his fist when he found it buried in the folds of his shirt.

The Doctor had insisted he stay near Sam even while investigating CCTV records with Jack. This was how Sam had ended up handcuffed to a chair in the corner of this area, bandaged gut aching with every breath he took in, just out of earshot and across the room from the man he'd tried to kill and the man who'd only just stopped him.

Sam caught a glimpse of the Doctor's face, midway through an angry rebuke. He heard the cuff around his wrist rattle against the chair and schooled his shaking hand to a steady tap on the chair's armrest, tried to calm his racing thoughts. It seemed to be getting harder, since two nights ago. Since leaving 1973. Since the Doctor.

"More surveillance in this country than you can shake a stick at and they still can't find a thing."

Sam turned his head to see Martha standing near him, arms crossed over her red jacket. For a moment, all he could think of was the sound of her voice calling him "monster," but he realized he felt strangely numb to the suspicion. Gone was the rage and frustration of 1973, the constant sting of persecution. Sam Tyler had nearly murdered a man and he'd felt good doing it.

Sam looked back to where Jack and the Doctor were reviewing swaths of security footage, interspersed with unnatural lengths of static and distortion. "It can land convictions," he said dully.

Martha let out a tight laugh. "That's right. 'Sam _Tyler_.' A policeman."

Sam tensed in his chair, defensive, defenseless. "So I'm told."

When Martha didn't answer, Sam directed his attention once again to the screens. Jack and the Doctor seemed to have settled on a scant sliver of footage and were playing the frames one-by-one, back and forth. Two shadows appeared and then disappeared around a corner, visible for less than a second. One seemed to be supporting the other.

"That's me, isn't it?" Sam shifted in his seat. "Me and--"

The stranger. The Other.

_I've got you._

"--that... man. With the metal fingers." Sam squinted at the screen despite his distance from it. "Who the hell was he?"

The woman's line of sight stayed on the Doctor where he bent over the keyboard, hand pressed flat and tight against the desktop. Intense worry creased his brow.

"I might have an idea," she muttered.

The Doctor glanced up from the desk and for a brief, terrible moment, his eyes met Sam's from across the room. He blinked and then smiled, tired and sincere.

A lump swelled in Sam's throat. He bowed his head.

"I don't understand. The Doctor -- why does he bother? Why does he care, after I..."

Silence hung in the room, interspersed with the click-clack of a keyboard.

Martha sighed. "Because he thinks you're all he has."

Sam tapped on the armrest, feeling sick from it, exhausted, like a man kept awake by a faucet leak.

One, two, three, four.

One, two, three--

"Martha."

The Doctor stood a few feet away, hands in his pockets. It was only a moment before Martha let out a sigh and walked past him, out of the corner and away from Sam.

"Be careful," she said to the Doctor as she passed him. "Please."

Sam watched her go and then returned his attention to the Doctor. Amongst the room's cubicle knick-knacks and looseleaf paper, he seemed at once both more and less than a man, another ancient weapon on another cluttered shelf, waiting to be called to action.

Sam clenched his hand into a fist. "What's happening to me?"

When the Doctor's mouth opened all too readily, all too easily, fire shot up Sam's lungs and into his throat.

"The truth, Doctor," he hissed. "I don't know what I'll do otherwise."

Sam tapped harder on the armrest. He swallowed, dizzy with every wave of fury, weak with every digression from sense. He couldn't control it.

The Doctor scuffed his foot against the ground, then fidgeted his hands in his pockets. "Dodona Tree," he finally said. "Someone's planted a Dodona Tree in you."

Sam shook his head. "That's supposed to mean something to me?"

"It's a telepathic technique. Forbidden. Taboo." The Doctor let out a breath. "Only a psychic with extensive experience can achieve it, and only If the subject's defenses are in disarray. Like yours."

Sam sat upright in his chair, a strange sense of hope in his chest to match the growing dread. "Is that... is that what I've been hearing, then? The drums. Did that man put them there? Can you take them out?"

The Doctor looked away, brow creased. "No. I'm afraid that's something else."

Sam bared his teeth, feeling feral. Caged. "So what the hell is this 'tree' thing, then?"

"It's a psychic pylon. A beacon planted deep in a mind's subconscious."

The mountains, the grass, the tree. "Why?"

The Doctor turned toward him. "Because it allows the user direct access. The psychic can, with touch alone, impose their will on the subject -- enter their mindscape and shape it to their whim."

Sam remembered the fingers at the back of his neck, warm and cold. His hair prickled where he'd been touched.

"Except it comes at a price," the Doctor continued, still fidgeting. "The Dodona Tree -- it's not just an implant. It's a transplant. It's a living piece of the psychic's own consciousness, ripped out of themselves and sewn into someone else."

Sam's hand went still on the armrest, tapping gone, four-beat momentarily replaced by sharp, jagged fear.

"Someone else is inside my head?"

The Doctor looked off, troubled. "Not exactly. A Dodona Tree stays dormant unless activated by the user, but..." He dragged his hand through his hair. "Why leave you here, then? It'd be insane for a telepath to implant their Dodona Tree and then leave you -- psychic suicide. Spend too long without a piece of your own mind, and..."

"Doctor?"

Sam and the Doctor turned to see Jack standing by the nearby desk, arms crossed over his chest.

"We found something. Clues in our archives -- Torchwood-4's. Manchester division."

"And that means...?" Sam called from his chair, head swimming. _Dodona Tree. Dodona Tree._

"Torchwood monitors alien technology -- mine in particular," the Doctor said as he walked over, an edge of ire to his voice. "The more dangerous, the better. That's why they homed in on your Chameleon object -- the Bowie tape -- in the seventies."

Sam's head snapped up, momentarily distracted from the fear lancing through him. "We're back to my bloody Bowie tape?"

"You haven't told him that either?" Jack winced and shook his head. "Doctor..."

The Doctor shot a glare back at him. "If it hadn't been for Torchwood's meddling, Sam would be safe and none of this would've happened."

"It's not his safety I'm worried about," Jack muttered. He scratched his cheek. "Anyway, I was a grunt back then. I never had direct contact with Torchwood-4, and last I heard, they'd disbanded."

"Disbanded?" the Doctor asked.

"Nothing but rumors these days." Jack shrugged. "I've heard of a splinter cell active in the North, but I doubt they could operate independently without a hell of an expert in alien tech."

Sam brought a hand to his eyes and pressed so hard it hurt, because an expert in 'alien tech' was the least of his problems right now -- world broken, mind swimming, ears pounding with the incessant four-beat he could hardly fathom he'd lived without.

_All in your head. All in your head._

"Here." Gwen gestured at her computer terminal. "I think I've got something."

Jack and the Doctor both turned as windows popped up on her screen, all tagged with ascending dates: 1942, 1943, 1944...

"I've got basic information on the founding of Torchwood-4 and its members throughout the years," Gwen said as each graphic sprawled out in a web of lines to display several black and white photos. "Nothing in-depth, not like... not like Tosh could have dug up, but at least we've found their daily logs. It looks like the records start in early 1942."

"During the Blitz." Jack leaned over her shoulder and rapped his knuckles on the desktop. "Makes sense. Everyone was gearing up for an alien weapons race against the Nazis back then."

"Rewriting history into science fiction, are we?" Sam retorted with a scowl. "Was my life not enough for you?"

Though the Doctor shot Sam a troubled glance, Jack completely ignored him. "They got any logs for advanced hardware they might've picked up? Maybe an 8-track tape with a Time Lord energy signature?"

"Aside from the fact that they were already computerized in the 40's, I don't..." Gwen trailed off as the computer beeped out an error message and a large white box took over the screen.

"What's going on?" the Doctor demanded.

"Nothing," Jack replied with a frown. "We ran out of records."

Gwen narrowed her eyes. "But that can't be right. There's no mention of them disbanding. The daily entries just... end."

Nausea sunk to the bottom of Sam's aching, healing gut. "When?"

Gwen frowned. "The last entry is dated... August 15th, 1973."

Sam's heart stopped.

"That's tomorrow," he breathed.

When Gwen frowned at him like he'd gone even madder, he shook his head. "Where I came from -- _when_ I came from... that's tomorrow."

"Gwen," Jack asked, "we got a location on their HQ?"

"Tosh's program is still decrypting the information." Gwen typed out a few characters, then clicked a confirmation button. "Looks like one of the last entries does mention a Time Lord -- something about... a transfer? From one object to another?"

"The 8-track tape's protective measures must have degraded under their experimentation." The Doctor grit his teeth. "They probably moved the Time Lord essence to a different object -- perfect time for it to start psychically influencing one of their own."

Several sepia-toned profile pictures popped up on the screen, then a generic user icon. Gwen continued typing. "Whoever entered the last entry doesn't have an ID in the database, but I think we're about to..."

The computer crackled with sound. Scratchy audio crept out of the speakers, quiet and distorted, along with the sound of footsteps, clipped, like boots on tile. Audio wavelengths rose and fell on the computer screen as breathing became audible.

A woman spoke.

"Sam... please, god, Sam, if you're there--"

Sam nearly shot out of his chair, yanked back by the force of the handcuffs.

"Annie--!" he shouted

Something cracked through the audio. Annie cried out.

A slam. Another voice shouted, "You keep your fucking hands off her, you murdering _bastard_ \--"

The audio cut to static, then stopped.

Computers hummed. A stray vent rattled. Sam's eyes fixed on the blank screen, body unmoving.

"Those are my friends," he whispered.

Another silence hung in the room, this one less somber, more awkward. Finally, like a man feigning delicacy because he couldn't bring himself to try harder, Jack said, "You realize this recording's from thirty-five years ago. You realize that whatever happened, happ--"

"No. I was there. I was just _there_ , and--" Sam swallowed and looked toward the Doctor, aching with hope and dread. "You can take me back, can't you?"

The Doctor scratched his head. "Sam, it's not so--"

"She spoke to me!" Sam cried, hand straining against the handcuff. "She must have known I would hear her, that I could stop this from--"

For a brief moment, he saw the web of possibilities, outcomes, history folding in on itself at a single point, creasing outward into fleeting pond ripples, craggy mountains. Something larger, something so much more beautiful than a straight line on a single planet, one speck of dust tied and knotted to a million, billion counterparts. The universe itself spiraled up and down, stretched out in front of him, waiting and wanting. Pulsing, drumming, needing direction and guidance from someone who understood it.

Someone like him.

Sam gasped. He felt hands on either side of his face, body low and sunken into the chair. He felt cold, sweaty, dry-mouthed.

"We need to get you out of here," the Doctor said, grip tight. "The connection to Torchwood's surrogate Chameleon object in 1973 is already unstable. If we don't get you back now, it might--"

Sam grabbed the Doctor by his tie. "I don't care about me," he gasped. "Annie. Gene. I need to--"

Drums slammed into him. Needles in his forehead, spikes through his temples. _One, two, three, four._ Sam screamed, doubled over, clenched his hands on the armrests and wheezed.

The Doctor's hand dug into Sam's shoulder. "It's all right," he said, faraway, "it's all right," as the handcuff around his wrist loosened and fell. Sam clung to the arm, like a drowning sailor to a buoy.

Jack's voice cut in. "Doctor, you can't--"

"He'll die otherwise," the Doctor's voice shot back. "He'll die, Jack, so yes. I can."

_Don't bother, Sam. You'll lose them, Sam._

_Can't save them, Sam._

Doors enveloped Sam's sight, bright and blue. They slammed open to a gold-bright interior, though the TARDIS hadn't been like that before, had it -- the Doctor's --

A voice broke through the mechanical din.

"It was you who saved him, wasn't it?"

The Doctor's hand seized where it held Sam's arm. Martha stood at the center of the Torchwood hub, staring with hard conviction.

"The only man who'd give everything for him," she said, level. "Who'd cross his own timeline. Who'd give up a slice of his mind. You -- a future you."

The Doctor looked away.

He turned back to the TARDIS and stepped inside, pulling Sam with him. The doors slammed shut behind him.

Sam gasped. His back hit the locked doors and he curled his arms to his chest. Shivers crept up his body.

The Doctor sprinted to the console. He wrenched a dial left, slammed a lever up, and waved away steam as the machine shook and groaned.

"It's all right," he babbled, "we'll get you back. It'll be all right." 

_We'll get you back. We'll get you back._

The room whirled. Sam's shoulder dug into the wooden doors. Something ached deep in his bones, something clawing, fighting, dying. Something that hated the drums fading, fading, that hated the weight of clear thoughts, of duty and guilt. It clung to life because it had nothing else left.

One, two, three, four. Fainter now.

One, two, three...

The walls shuddered to a halt. The doors whipped open behind him.

Sam stumbled backward, out of the TARDIS. His hands scrabbled for purchase on the doorframe and he breathed hard, delirious, hardly aware of the cobblestone beneath his feet or the chill air against his cheek. He swallowed, wide-eyed. The drums. They were gone--

Something smashed into him.

Pain exploded in Sam's stomach. Searing heat shot straight through his wound as his vision went white. He reeled sideways, winded, as two hands caught his collar, solid as iron, real as bricks, hard and ruthless as they slammed him against the side of the TARDIS like it was nothing more than slat blinds and metal cabinets.

"You arse-buggered _bastard._ "

"Christ, I missed you," Sam wheezed.

"Missed me?" Gene's fingers went rigid in his shirt and Sam's shoulders slammed into the wall. " _Missed_ me? You disappeared into sodding air, you half-wit Houdini lunatic!"

Sam blinked up, blearily, at the same wide eyes, same rigid coat shoulders, same bone-shaken fury from that night two days ago, thirty years ago, distilled and frozen in a single moment like a photograph on a fluttering page.

"God," Sam breathed. "Has it only been minutes for you?"

"Fuck all are you on about, you daft..."

Gene stopped.

His hand went flat against one of Sam's jacket lapels. His fingers paused, then tightened as he pulled it back to reveal a large red stain on the front of Sam's shirt. The bandages underneath the tear had begun to bleed bright and fresh where Gene had hit him.

Gene raised his eyes to meet Sam's, something strange and quiet in his expression. 

Sam stared back.

He'd nearly forgotten what it was like, for someone to give a damn.

"Sam..." the Doctor's voice broke in from the TARDIS doorway.

Gene's palm slammed Sam back into the wall. Sam's shoulder blades cracked against the wood and Gene looked toward the Doctor, fist balled, nearly shaking.

"One step closer and you won't make it to prison."

The Doctor blinked at Gene, like he'd forgotten his relevance to an equation. "Good -- I've no intention of visiting," he retorted, voice laced with minor irritation as he extended a hand toward Sam. "Come on, no time for this. We have to--"

Gene's hand shot out and grabbed the Doctor's wrist, then wrenched it around hard enough to send him careening shoulder-first into the TARDIS wall. Handcuffs hit the Doctor's wrist and and the TARDIS' door handle, clicking like a double deadbolt.

"Or," Gene snarled, "I could start by breaking off fingers."

Something hit Sam like another strike to his chest.

Metal fingers. Dodona tree.

_The only man who'd give everything for him._

"Stop!" Sam cried. His hands caught Gene's arm and he yanked him back. "Guv--"

"Do you suggest we let him go?" Gene whirled on him. "Is that how we deal with freak-of-nature murderers, Tyler? Is that what you learned in Hyde?"

"He's not the murderer!" Sam shouted, hands tight on Gene's shoulder. "For God's sake, Gene, if you trust me on anything--"

"Like I did in the cells?" Gene slapped his arm away and advanced on him like a mad dog. "Like I did with the keys, with your job, with my bloody department?"

Sam stood, cold and shaking.

Gene jabbed a finger at him. "What did he do to you?"

"He made me," Sam uttered before he could think.

"Into what?" Gene shot back. "A suicidal idiot?"

"Mainly," the Doctor said, rattling his cuff.

Gene turned, fist clenched, before Sam grabbed him and yanked him back again.

"Listen to me," Sam breathed, inches away, "you're in danger."

"I've got eyes, don't I!" Gene shouted back.

"Tomorrow." Sam's voice caught in his throat. "The murderer -- the real murderer -- he's going to come after you and Annie. I need to stop him."

"Stop him?" Gene bellowed. "State you're in, you couldn't stop a crippled granny!"

"Guv, please--"

A car engine roared around the corner, swallowing Sam's words. Sam winced and shaded his eyes from the headlights as it screeched to a halt in front of him and the doors slammed open.

"Guv!" Ray's voice called out. "Came quick as y'called!"

"Armed an' ready, Guv!" Chris' voice echoed from the passenger's side.

And there, from the rear seat and into the misty air, like something of a dream--

"Sam...?" Annie said.

Sam stood still, a man exposed at trial, naked and tarred. He shivered as she neared him, first a walk, then a run.

"Oh!" She covered her mouth with one hand and reached the other toward his bloodstain. "Sam, you're hurt...!"

"I'm fine." Sam caught her shoulders and squeezed. "But you -- Annie -- it's not safe. You should go back to the station."

Annie's expression shifted. She grit her teeth and stepped backward. "Back to the station. While you're acting like... like this?"

"Only one going back there is you," Ray spat, gun trained on Sam. "Bastard traitor!"

"He's just sick." Annie shook her head and swallowed. "He's just sick, is all..."

"I'm not!" Sam shouted. "I'm not mad -- Annie, all this time, I've not been mad!"

Sam realized, then. He realized what he had, what he'd never had before.

He swung toward Gene. "Tell her, Guv!"

Gene shifted. He crossed his arms over his chest. "Tell her what?"

"Bloody -- you know exactly what!" Sam waved his hand at the blue box, furious, desperate, on the precipice of vindication. "What you saw! For God's sake, tell her what you saw!"

Gene's eyes traveled to where the Doctor was still rattling his cuff on the TARDIS' handle, then back to Sam.

"Police box vanished into thin air," he said. He turned toward his team, severe and resolute. "Me eyes know a trick when they see one. This wasn't."

Sam let out a long breath. Gene gave the team a moment to soak it in, which happened at varying degrees. Ray guffawed, nervous. Chris fiddled with his lighter.

Sam chanced a weary glance at Annie. She shook her head slowly. "I don't..."

Something rang through the air to interrupt her, obnoxiously tinny, frightfully loud. And Sam... Sam assumed he was hearing things, because he always heard things -- heart monitors and breathing tubes, voices and drums. A mobile ringtone wasn't so different.

Until Annie turned. Until everyone turned toward the Doctor -- here, on a street in 1973.

The Doctor straightened. "Oh! Oh, that'd be me!"

He dug in his pocket with his free hand. Sam watched, paralyzed with instinctual, anachronistic horror, as he retrieved his mobile and brought it to his cheek

"Yes -- Jack!" The Doctor grinned into the lit-up receiver. "We're all right, thank you -- quite fine, quite fine... Oh? A location? On the Torchwood-4 HQ?"

"Is that a radio?" Ray asked aside to Chris.

"Don't think so." Chris shook his head sagely. "Not talkin' code-like."

"Right -- yes," the Doctor chatted back, "Manchester, 1973. And you say the address is..."

His smile fell off his face. He turned to look up at the building in front of them.

"That's... oh," he said. "Yes. I'm there right now."


	8. I: Iron Man | vi

vi.

_nobody wants him_   
_they just turn their heads_   
_nobody needs him_   
_now he has his revenge_

\---

The Doctor stumbled through the front door with the force of Gene's shove.

"Oh, come now!" he complained.

Sam followed, mere footsteps behind, fists balled and gait furious, anxious. "Guv, he's right. You've no idea what you're dealing with--"

"Too right I don't." Gene clenched his fingers into the Doctor's collar. "I'm getting to the bottom of this unholy mess if it's the last thing I do."

He turned in the doorway to face Ray, standing near the building's front steps. Nearby, Chris was grabbing equipment from the Cortina at Gene's behest. "Lads, call back-up and get a move on -- we'll not be waiting for 'em."

"Aye, Guv!" Chris closed the car door and strode up from the pavement as he brought his radio to his mouth. "Base, this is 690, requestin' back-up, over..."

Annie followed behind them, purse pulled tight against her side. She avoided Sam's eyes when he tried to meet hers, and would have passed him altogether if not for Gene getting in her way.

"You'll be staying," he said.

Annie halted, aghast. "Guv--"

"With this excuse for one of her majesty's finest."

For a moment, Sam didn't register Gene's gesture in his direction, so firm was his resolution, so righteous was his need. Inside this heap of bricks was the only thing left that he knew to have any claim to. It hadn't occurred to him he might be robbed of it too.

"What?" he said, small. "No -- no, Guv--"

"You'll stay here," Gene said. He tossed the Doctor in Ray's general direction, then reached for the front of Sam's shirt. "You will not move from this spot or so help me god I will tear you a new hole from which to spew your _shit_."

Words rose up Sam's throat, pure and raw. _You bastard, you idiot, you don't understand, I need to know, I need to--_

"Get in the car, Sam," Gene said.

The words stopped. Replaced by them were images -- a pistol, a blue box, a plan gone wrong. A cold night like this one when he'd thrown everything away.

After a moment, Annie's hand grasped his shoulder. It guided him round and down the uneven steps, out of his own idiot grief. He didn't stop her.

"Yes, Sam," said the Doctor's voice behind him, strained but overcome with relief despite it all. "Stay right here -- that's what's safest for everyone."

"You say that now," Sam mumbled.

Annie's grip tightened and her pace hurried. The Doctor let out a grunt, no doubt from Ray twisting his arm, as he and the others stormed their way in through the building's dilapidated facade.

Sam didn't look back. He followed Annie's lead as she opened the Cortina's rear door. He sunk into the tobacco-stinking seat like something of the sea, descending back into the familiar deep from which it came.

Annie sat down next to him. She closed the door and locked them in silence, buffered from the cold. Everything seemed so empty without the drums.

"Sam." Her voice shook. "Please. Talk to me."

She rested her hand over his, on his knee. _Please. Talk to me._ He could feel the four-beat in her skin, in her veins, in the bones of her fingers.

"I went home," he said. "To the future."

When Annie didn't answer, Sam swallowed and went on. "The box, the one that disappeared... it took me there. And I found me mum, but it wasn't..."

He sucked in a breath as a hole grew in his middle, a deep, numb ache under his bandages. "But it wasn't really her. She hurt me, and... and someone saved me, but the way they all acted -- like I was a monster. Like I wasn't me."

His hand clenched under hers. The Doctor on the metal table, choking under his hand. Sam's smile. Like a dam had cracked and something had broken, gasping, through the surface.

Like he'd been set free.

"Annie," he whispered, "I don't think I'm me."

It hung in the air. The man named Sam Tyler shut his eyes and for a moment felt the world fall away.

_Master,_ the Doctor had said.

Something warm pressed in under his jacket lapels, over his ribs and beating heart. He opened his eyes and Annie looked back, inches away, mouth set with firm decision.

"You're here now," she said. "You're you, and you're home."

Sam blinked back at her and then they came -- tears like Noah's flood, catastrophic, tearing down walls to mud and dust. He must have looked so ugly, crying on her shoulder like something newborn.

"I'm sorry," he sobbed. "I'm so sorry."

"It's all right," she said, arms tight around his back. "Shh. It's all right."

He lost time like that, face pressed against her. Her cardigan soaked through, but she didn't move an inch, and that's what made her so beautiful, Sam thought -- because she never moved, never faltered. Always there for him, every time he pushed away. She might not believe his words, but she believed in him, in who he was.

She made him real.

He felt her shift beneath him. "Sam."

A tone of concern laced her voice, but not the kind he expected -- this was immediate, practical. It hit the part of Sam's mind that still called itself "copper," and he sat up, sharply.

"What is it?" He sniffed and rubbed under his nose, over his mouth.

"The back-up," Annie said, facing the nearest window. "Should they have arrived by now?"

Sam gazed out at the empty street. In truth, he didn't know if it had been five minutes or thirty.

"Perhaps they're delayed," he said, mind still clouded.

Annie shook her head as mild annoyance crossed her face. "He probably forgot to press the 'receive' switch when he called. Didn't remember to bring extra radios for us, either."

Sam frowned. "Who?"

Annie's hand went flat against her lap. "Chris. He's been... off, lately."

Sam grimaced out a smile. "Chris? Off? You don't--"

"I mean it, Sam." She crossed her arms. "I know you haven't noticed -- because you don't bother to notice things about us sometimes, but--"

Sam pulled back, cosmic grief overshadowed by mild offense. "What are you on about?"

"His girlfriend." Annie gazed back at him, troubled. "Everyone knows his girlfriend up and left him -- just this week. Ray hadn't even met her, Chris was so nervous. He was going to finally bring her down to the Arms a few days ago, but..."

Sam vaguely remembered Chris mentioning personal problems, that day at the crime scene. He dug the heel of his palm into one of his red, sore eyes. Fucking Christ, like he'd had a minute to pay attention to any of it.

"I've been time-traveling," he muttered. "Doesn't mean I've been relying on your notes to do my job."

"Oh -- no, no." Annie ran her fingers through her hair. "If anything, he's been... rather too proactive, I think."

Sam paused. Something was beginning to sit rather funny in the pit of his stomach.

"How do you mean?" he asked.

For a moment, Annie pursed her lips. "That brochure," she finally said, "the one that led us to Lupei's flat in the first place. You didn't think it odd, how Chris just... found it?"

"Of course I did," Sam snorted. Familiar irritation tempered his growing unease. "It was the Guv who--"

"And then, when we tracked down Lupei outright -- it was just me and him, and..." Annie frowned with the memory. "All he said was he had a lead. Never explained, never followed up. I was about to check on that with you, you know -- in the canteen. Before the Guv came in."

"I thought..." Sam's hand tightened against his thigh. "He said you dug up her nephew's address, some old paperwork..."

"What?" Annie asked, confused. "What nephew?"

Sam looked back at her, mind and vision clear, attention locked completely.

Something was wrong.

Something was very wrong.

He sat up, reached forward, pulled himself over the driver's seat and scrabbled frantically for the Cortina's radio.

"Sam," Annie said, severe, "what's going on?"

"God." Sam clutched the radio receiver in one hand, cord hanging out in a tangle of exposed wires. "He cut it."

Annie's fingers dug into the seatback. "Why?"

Sam's hand began to shake.

"No," he whispered.

_"They're under the influence of a Chameleon object." The Doctor shook his head. "It's controlling them through a psychic link. Same modus operandi, same motive -- but a different perpetrator each time."_

Sam pressed a hand to his mouth.

_"Most we can tell, Brittany Kenton weren't expecting to kick it none soon," Ray drawled. "Bought garden vegetables from a neighbor yesterday mornin' -- apparently was a bit broke up over leavin' her boyfriend, nothin' else."_

The evidence bag at Sarah Wellington's crime scene. A pack of gum, a compact mirror, and...

_"They probably moved the Time Lord essence to a different object."_

"Chris' lighter," Sam said.

Annie's knuckles had gone white. "What about it?"

Sam turned toward her, slow as ash.

"It's broken."

\---

They found their path through the derelict building already paved with open doors hanging lopsided off their hinges. Sam shoved through them with Annie close behind, dodging broken floorboards and rusted nails.

"Guv!" He shouted. It should have been loud enough to wake any neighbors, but there was something strange about this place, about the walls -- like they'd been built to keep the sound in.

"But why?" Annie called behind him. "Why would Chris do such a thing?"

"He's done worse," Sam breathed, not thinking of it, of what he meant, willing himself not to picture anything more than the Cortina's broken radio as he made his way past remains of an old stove. Instead, he focused on the interior of the building, the layout of it. It looked as if this level had originally been meant to house a small family, much like the other buildings in the neighborhood, but it seemed oddly barren -- not one piece of abandoned furniture aside from the basic appliances. As if it had never at any point been used for its intended purpose.

"Sam, look."

He turned from the kitchen to see Annie maneuver around a pile of broken drywall and toward a door unlike the others. It was metal, more like the entrance to a safe than a common cellar, and slightly ajar. Sam made his way toward it as Annie fumbled with her purse.

She extracted a small torch from her bag and then pointed it down a long, dark flight of stairs, beam swallowed up in the depth.

"What do you suppose is down there?" she asked.

"Nothing good." Sam grabbed the railing and outstretched his hand toward her. "Give me the torch. You watch the door."

Sam's hand stung as Annie slapped it away.

"Leave you? In this state?" She shouldered past him and made headway down the stairs. "Right chance!"

"Annie--" Sam started.

"No." She whirled on him, lower on the stairs than him and yet larger, angrier. "I've had enough of staying behind tonight, and with all this talk of futures and murder and betrayal, I..." She bit her lip, shook her head. "I won't have it!"

Sam opened his mouth and closed it again as he remembered which one of them had a tear-soaked blouse.

"Yeah," he said, "okay."

Annie nodded and turned back toward the stairwell.

It took them roughly five minutes to reach the bottom flight, at which point Sam could already feel the hairs at the back of his neck stand on-end. The unmistakable dank chill of the far underground might have been the cause, though he suspected it had more to do with the ghostly blue glow from the large space beyond the stairs, past another vault-like door.

Annie stood a moment in the high-ceilinged room, in front of the half-dozen screens shining out of a half-moon console.

"Are these... televisions?" Her voice echoed off the walls.

"Computers." Sam marched past them and cupped his hands around his mouth. "Guv! Ray!"

"But they're so small..." Annie trailed off. She might have been thinking back, suddenly, to the scribbles in Sam's notebook, to the talk of "PCs" and "internet." Once, Sam might have killed to show her this, prove her this, but that was a lifetime ago. He had more important things now.

"Where the bloody hell did they _go_." Sam balled his fists and turned on his heel in search of any point of exit from the room. One hallway stretched to the right, labeled "Kitchen/Quarters," while the other, to his left, sported a hazard sign and secure sliding door -- wrenched ajar and red light blinking.

"That'd be it," he said, throat dry.

"It says something here," Annie said, squinting at one of the monitors. She shook her head and headed back toward Sam. "Something about a 'quarantine' -- 'psychic breach'...?"

"They must have tried to seal off the facility after their tests went wrong." Sam strode toward the door and shoved it aside, revealing another hallway. "Perhaps they evacuated?"

Annie pointed her torch down the hall. A line of smeared, dried blood led into a door at the far end of the corridor.

"Not certain they made it that far," she murmured.

Sam reached for his holster before he realized he wasn't equipped with any. He stifled the urge to yell "Guv" again, tried to tell himself the blood looked old -- days old. He swallowed and stepped forward before Annie could take the lead.

They crept down the hallway. Industrial light bulbs flickered overhead, adding noise to the otherwise dead silence.

Sam placed his hand against the handle of the door as they approached it. There was a porthole window through the center of it, but it looked fogged -- hazy. All he could make out was a faint red glow from the other side.

Sam gripped the cold metal tight. He sucked in a breath, then thrust the door open.

The smell of blood accosted him, the pure copper sting of it. Like the roadway collision that had never happened, the carpet of his mum's crisp apartment.

"Oh, god..." Annie whispered.

For a moment, all Sam registered was breathing tubes and sonar beeps, one of his hospital nightmares in full surround sound. Then more came into focus -- wires and mechanical rigs centered around another half-circle console filled with grainy screens.

Each one showed a stand-by test card, with a little girl and her doll.

Sam stumbled backward.

More of the room flooded into his eyes. Figures, people suspended in air. Mostly alive and mostly not, bits cut out of them here and there. A hand, an eye, stomach stitched half to shreds. Kept in limbo like convicts on the rack.

"It's..." Annie's voice trembled behind him. "It's the Mangler's victims -- Harold Free, Sarah Wellington... god, they're... they're _alive._ "

Sam tasted bile at the back of his throat. He swallowed it down and rasped, "The Torchwood team's over here." Although the uniformed men and women were in better condition than the 'murder' victims, they too had jerry-rigged wires in their heads.

"Everyone except Brittany Kenton," Annie murmured. "She wasn't--"

"Didn't let 'im take her."

Sam turned toward the voice at the door. He breathed shallow, brow creased, heart wrenching like a hangman's rope.

"I had to." Wet streams glinted off Chris' cheeks. The barrel of his pistol shook where he pointed it at Sam. "Couldn't let 'er end up like this. It was that or this, and I had to... I couldn't..."

Chris clenched his other hand into a fist around his lighter, glinting red under the room's dull glow. He sounded like a little boy. "Didn't want to. Honest, Boss, I didn't..."

Annie stepped forward. "Chris, listen to us--"

Chris' pistol snapped toward her.

"Chris!" Sam shouted.

"Won't hurt 'er." Chris swallowed. "He said I wouldn't have to hurt 'er, hurt anyone, not after today."

"'He'...?" Annie asked.

Chris pressed his fist to his temple and drew in a sobbing breath. "Ideas. 'Orrible ideas -- words an' pictures, won't go away, won't go away..."

He rapped his knuckles against his skull. Sam counted, with exhausted, horrified expectation.

One, two, three, four.

One, two, three, four.

"It's for me," Sam said.

Annie turned toward him. "Sam?"

"All of this," Sam breathed. "It's been for me."

For this spot, for this moment, for this single and significant intersection in time. A beacon on an ocean, calling out to his depths, to the thing with teeth and aching hunger.

Chris slowly released his grip on the pistol. It clattered to the ground.

Annie raced toward it. Her knees slid against the ground and her fingers grasped the barrel when a sound hit the air, a high-pitched, painful whine. 

Sam slammed his hands to his ears. Annie crumpled to the ground.

"NO!" Sam yelled.

The sound stopped. Chris knelt down next to her, a rod-like instrument in his hand where the pistol had been.

"Chris--" Sam choked on his pounding heart. "Chris, no, god, _please_..."

"She's fine," Chris mumbled. "Jus' a little kip, s'all."

The rod -- Sam recognized it, from the Doctor's hand at Brittany Kenton's murder scene. It must have been the sonic screwdriver the Doctor had been on about and unable to find. Sam remembered... it had disappeared from the coat that Chris had left in the hall.

Chris stood up. Like an automaton, he walked to a panel by the door and punched in numbers. Sam skittered toward Annie's still form, turned her over, saw blood leaking out her ears and let out a sob of relief when her chest rose and fell. He cradled her with one arm and scrabbled with the other for the pistol still lying on the ground.

Chris hit a large green key. Clangs and thuds echoed through the facility, distant doors locking, bolts catching.

A woman's synthesized voice spoke slowly from the ceiling. "Quarantine complete. Torchwood-4 Purge Protocol commencing in eight minutes."

The pistol trembled in Sam's hand. "What's that?" 

"Gas is gonna fill up the place," Chris said in monotone. "Kill everyone -- Ray and the Guv too. And DI Smith -- sort of."

Sam's arm tightened around Annie's shoulders. "For Christ's sake, _why?_ "

"Only one person can stop it," Chris said. "Console up there -- ice-a-morphing lock -- isomorphic, somethin'. Can only be turned on by this one... this lord. Time Lord, think it's called."

"So get the fucking Doctor!" Sam shouted.

"Don't mean him, Boss," said Chris. 

Chris' hand loosened at his side. The lighter clattered to the ground.

For a moment, nothing else existed.

"No," Sam said. Red fields. Silver mountains. "No, I won't do that."

"Think that's the point," Chris mumbled.

Twin suns. Sam raised the pistol. "Chris, stop the countdown."

"Dunno how," said Chris.

"Stop it, you idiot!" Hot wind on his face. Sam's finger tightened on the trigger. "Stop it or I'll--"

Chris turned around, pale. "Do it," he said.

Sam faltered. Tall domes above his head. "Chris--"

"Know you can't let me go. Don't want to go, anyhow." Chris hiccuped, eyes wet, head shaking. "Not things you can live with, what I've done."

Sam looked back at him. Spire towers, burnt skies. Stars that shone like diamonds.

"Please, Boss." Chris smiled through tears. "For the good of the public."

Sam's voice cracked. "Chris--"

A figure slammed through doorway. Chris turned and didn't move, didn't bat an eye as his head struck the wall and he collapsed like a ragdoll to the floor.

Sam heaved in breaths as Gene yanked the sonic screwdriver from Chris' hand and turned, dark-eyed, one hand pressed to the thin line of blood smeared under his ear.

"Tyler," he uttered, like he hadn't expected to say it again.

"Guv," Sam breathed in turn.

The Doctor burst through the door. He hesitated, then made a beeline for Sam and grabbed him by the shoulders, twitchy, nervous.

"Still Sam." He swallowed, patted his cheek roughly. "Still Sam. Very good, Still-Sam."

They all must have already stood here before, in this terrible room, Sam thought. There could be no other reason why they weren't reacting to the horror suspended above their heads, the testament to wrong turns taken, evils under lock and key.

"Chris--" he breathed.

"Wasn't Chris," Gene answered, almost in monotone. "He wasn't our Chris."

"He set a timer for poison gas -- we'll be dead in minutes." Sam held Annie to his chest and began to stand up, supporting her. "The main doors are sealed -- we need to find a way out."

"Right, yes, but--" The Doctor's eyes moved back to Chris. "There's a lighter -- _the_ lighter, Torchwood's Chameleon object. DC Skelton had it -- that's why he turned on you lot, you know -- knocked us out, cut that poor girl to pieces--"

" _Doctor_ ," Gene growled.

Sam and the Doctor looked up to see Ray at the door, Chris clutched in his arms like a child. He turned, white as a sheet, from the door and out into the hallway.

"Right." The Doctor glanced down, shook his head. "Right, then."

The automated voice echoed sweetly through the facility. "Five minutes to Purge Protocol."

_Five minutes,_ Sam thought. _I have five minutes._

His grip tightened on Annie, around her shoulders and the backs of her knees. He held her in his arms, the warmth of her, the precious weight of her. He tried to take in every detail, etch it somewhere deep inside him with bare tools and frantic hands.

He let out an angry breath and shoved her toward the Doctor.

"I'm still wounded -- might drop her," he said. "We'll get to the exit, then work out the rest."

"Right." The Doctor took her, gingerly. "But the lighter--"

"It's in Chris' pocket," Sam said. "You can grab it in a moment, just -- take her, for godssakes!"

The Doctor stood up, unbalanced with the weight. He hesitated, but the look on Sam's face must have stopped him from protesting. He nodded and, with his charge, ran out the door.

Sam stood up and headed toward the door as Gene barreled into the hall ahead of him.

"You'll explain this," he hissed over his shoulder. "You'll explain this and then I'll beat your face in anyhow, bringing this down on all of us, on _Chris_ \--"

"Guv," Sam tried. The Doctor had rounded the corner, out of eyeshot, earshot.

"Did I say I was finished?!" Gene bellowed, rounding on him. "You're in a sea of shit, you are, so deep it's gone up your..."

He trailed off as he saw Sam standing just beyond the threshold to the terrible room.

In one hand, Sam clutched the door handle.

Sam shut the door a split second before Gene slammed into it. Sam wrenched the locking mechanism, then stepped back as Gene pounded a fist on the door's porthole window.

"Tyler!" he shouted.

Sam swallowed. He hit button labeled "COMM" beside the door and heard Gene's grainy breaths from the other side. "Gene, you need to--"

"How dare you," Gene snarled back, voice scratched with distortion. "How _dare_ you, you utter selfish shit, ask something of me--"

"This will be the last time," Sam said, certain and clear. "The last. I promise."

Gene stopped. Maybe he could make out Sam's shoulders through the reinforced glass, trembling like leaves despite his stalwart eyes and mouth.

"What are you on about?" Gene asked.

Sam didn't answer. He bent down to pick up the lighter from where Chris had dropped it.

It was heavy, cold. Something unseen curled out of it and around his hand. Gentle and terrifying, a wolf's jaws around its young.

One, two, three, four.

Sam exhaled. "Chris said only I can stop it."

Gene grit his teeth. "So get on with it! Save us all, you insufferable martyr!"

Sam rubbed a thumb over the etched metal. One, two, three, four.

"Funny, innit?" he mumbled. "All this time, you lot were the real ones."

That's when Gene worked it out.

Sam could tell -- the sudden silence, the frozen gesture, the way he began to breathe. He wasn't an idiot. Sam had been a fool, once, to think him an idiot.

"Two minutes to Purge Protocol," said the voice from above.

"Sam!" Gene slammed his fist onto the door, harder this time, like he didn't care if he shattered bone. "Shut up and open this sodding door, we need to _move!_ "

Sam's voice nearly broke, under the duress of time left, time wasted, time that could have been. "Whatever comes out of this room, it won't be me anymore."

Gene's eyes were wide. "Sam!"

"Promise you'll stop me," Sam said, hoarse, lighter clutched in his hand, future and past catching like flint and steel. "I think -- I think you'll need to stop me."

"You can stop your own sodding self, right now!"

"Please," Sam whispered. "Please, Gene. I can't do this alone."

Gene looked back at him through the dirty glass, something out of a dream once real, faded and far away.

"Okay," he said. "Bloody hell, okay."

Sam smiled, hurting. He stepped back from the door. "As soon as the front door's unlocked, get everyone out. Run."

Gene shook his head, slow. "I won't leave you--"

"Tell Annie I'm sorry," Sam choked. "Tell her -- tell her I should have listened."

"One minute, thirty seconds," the voice chimed in.

Sam shouted, "Gene, _go!_ "

For a second, Gene didn't move. He looked back at him, face open as Sam had ever seen it.

Like he was trying to take in every detail. Like he was trying to etch it somewhere deep, with bare tools and frantic hands.

Gene stepped back. He turned, and he ran.

\---

His name was Sam Tyler.

He'd had an accident and woke up in 1973.

He swallowed, throat swollen and thick. His palm sat, cold and clammy, against the metal railing leading up to the console. He breathed in the stink of death and rot, of lies and guilt, mistakes made real.

He wasn't mad. He wasn't in a coma.

Five steps felt like a thousand. Like he was climbing that Aztec pyramid from holiday all those years ago, a sacrifice to a god, a creature worth nothing more than the sum of its broken parts. Hollow offering from hollow means, shaking from the weight of it, the truth of it. He'd never been to Mexico.

"One minute," said the PA system.

The line of computers met him at the top of the small platform, wires torn out and wrapped in bunches over keyboards. Like the work of a child, a prodigy, something pure and selfish, brilliant and cruel, manipulating clumsy hands not its own. For a moment, Sam thought he could see a pattern in the circuitry, haphazard as it was, like he could understand the need, the desperation.

Like this thing had landed on a different planet.

Like it was trying to get home.

"Are you ready, Sam?"

She stood off to his left, a bright patch of red at the edge of his vision. Her stuffed clown hung from her hand like the bodies hung from the ceiling. "You'll finally be a real boy."

He turned toward her. A blonde woman in a red slip looked back, bruised around her eye. "That's it, darling. That's the way."

He blinked, and she was Annie, in her red dress from that day, face bloody and pale. "Sam, _help_ us--"

He turned away. The lighter hummed inside his hand. He pressed his fist to his mouth.

"My name is Sam Tyler," he whispered.

One, two, three, four.

The lighter clicked into a slot in the console like it'd been made for it, and it had.

Light shot down wires from each hanging body, small bursts of stars, electric cracks. Like the device in the TARDIS and every other neon signpost that had pointed him this way, that had called him and cradled him and led him by the hand.

He shook. Lights glowed brighter and machines whirred harder. Breathing tubes and sonar beeps, like he'd always heard, like he'd always known. He would die the way he was born.

He let go of the lighter. He sucked in a breath as it opened, as white light poured into his lungs, his stomach, under nails and skin and through the walls of his heart.

Hearts.

He stopped. Straightened.

"Oh," he said.

\---

_heavy boots of lead_   
_fill his victims full of dread_   
_running as fast as they can_   
_Iron Man lives again_


	9. II: The Seeker | o

o.

\---

In 1942, a boy stood on a street.

It wasn't a large street. Crowded in on either side by two-story flat-houses, the thin, snake-like curve of the road made it small to anyone who might see it from above, naught but a tiny crevasse in the sprawl of the city, edged in by bricks and mortar. But to a boy, it might seem huge. It might seem mountainous, insurmountable, a canyon cut straight from sky to ground. It might seem like the walls of the world, conspiring to keep him caged.

The boy swallowed a lump in his throat and rubbed the bruises under his collar, clammy and wet from sweat and cold. It'd been hours since he'd run out his front door with little more than an old shirt and stinging welts, since he'd soaked up enough mist and rain to feel a sodden rag.

Alarms blared. A shiver traveled up the length of his spine and situated itself between his shoulders, where he sagged from awful exhaustion. He was tired and hungry. He was scared.

He'd lost someone, here on the street he lived.

Here on Percy Lane.


	10. II: The Seeker | i

i.

_I've looked under chairs_   
_I've looked under tables_   
_I've tried to find the key_   
_to fifty million fables_

\---

Gene's knuckles pressed, cold and aching, against the stone wall beside him.

His line of sight stayed on the floor, on a splotch of dirty brown amongst the otherwise grey concrete. Easier on the eyes, that, than the mess before him, the mess behind him. Dead things, live things, trapped in crypts made of concrete, roughed up and mixed about like an old road gone muddy out your own front door. He'd known the stops, the signs, every curve in the tarmac -- until it'd caved out underfoot.

Bit like his team. Like his poncy DI.

"DCI Hunt!"

Gene raised his head. The Doctor raced toward him down the hall, bastard face lit up with a smile -- small one, not for his own sake, and fake as all the rest of him. "You've got my sonic, I'm afraid -- need it to find that lighter... but! No need to worry, should be able to get us out in time, should be..."

He trailed off the same way his footsteps did. His smile shrank down to what it really was -- nothing.

"Where's Sam?" he asked.

Gene's knuckles scraped the wall as he pulled them away. He walked past the Doctor, gait harder, faster with each step. Rookie move, to stop like that. To think like that, with lives at stake.

"Need to get to my team," Gene said. "Got one chance out of your mess -- won't waste it."

The Doctor didn't follow him.

"Where," he repeated, "is Sam?"

"Dead, I expect." There it was, out in the open. Steady. Real.

Gene strode on forward, like a good lad, like a cog that turned, creaking, because the whole machine might break down without it. He didn't stop as he got out the hall and into the big room, as he met Ray's wide eyes across the distance.

"Guv!" Ray called, Chris still held in his arms. Cartwright was laid out on the floor -- sodding hell, the Doctor _would_ leave a bird like that. Ray looked to the vault door beside him. "Guv, we've got to--"

"Thirty seconds," said the bloody intercom. "29. 28..."

"We need to go back!" The Doctor's voice rang out, loud enough for Gene to turn his head. The Doctor stood with his hands clenched, shoulders shaking. His face looked a wall of terror, disbelief wrapped up in panic and dread. "All of this -- it's been a trap!"

"You don't say!" Gene broke into a run, knelt down next to Annie, tried to haul her up by the shoulder.

She coughed at his touch and lurched upward -- same as Gene had, when he'd come to. 

"Where--" she asked.

"Don't mind that, love." Gene heaved her up on unsteady feet, then turned to face the door.

He realized, now, at the fifteen-second mark. How daft this all was -- how stupid. He really expected it to open. He really expected his DI had, this time as opposed to many, known what the bloody hell he was doing.

"13..." said the intercom.

"I need my sonic!" The Doctor ran up behind them. "I need it now, right now!"

"Ten seconds and you'll have it off my corpse!" Gene shouted.

"8..."

Annie stood straighter. "Guv, what's--"

Gene felt the Doctor yank on his coat pocket. 

"5..."

"I can fix this," the Doctor babbled as he fumbled with his gadget, "I can--"

He froze mid-sentence.

The Doctor stumbled, wheezed. He pressed his hands to his head and fell to the floor, wide-eyed and gasping, as if drowning in air thick as mud, under the weight of it, the glut of it.

The intercom went silent. Something clicked.

Gene turned as the vault door creaked open.

"Guv!" Ray yelled, pace quick as he made his way to the exit. "Guv, it's open!"

"So get on through!" Gene shouted, voice almost sucked out by the breath he'd been holding. He steeled his legs and gripped Annie's shoulder as they marched past the doorway and into the stairwell.

Annie coughed and staggered a step away from him as she wiped blood from her ear with her palm. It smeared over her neck, plastered curls to her cheek.

"I'm fine, Guv, where's..." Annie's eyes drifted around the area. "Where's Sam?"

"Gone," the Doctor whispered to the floor. His nails scraped against the ground where he closed his hands into fists. "He's gone."

Gene turned and would have grabbed the bastard's collar if he'd not been minding Cartwright, would have yanked him off his feet and thrown him to the ground, would have kicked him in the face to a good and beaten pulp.

"What do you mean?" Annie's voice was small, her shoulders tense. "Guv, what's he mean?"

Gene grit his teeth. He looked toward the gaping maw of a room, televisions glowing from the middle like some kind of bug-eyed cinema. "Countdown didn't finish. He's still alive in there."

The Doctor shook his head as he stood. "No. We need to go. We need to go now."

Fire shot down Gene's arms -- the kind of matchstick flare that hit you with _those_ criminals, the real animals, the ones that got you sick to your bones, like your skin didn't fit right, like you'd never feel hungry again.

He lunged, grabbed the Doctor by the front of his suit. He dragged him past the vault door's threshold and slammed his shoulders into the ground.

"Cartwright, get cuffs on this _thing,_ " Gene snarled. "I'll retrieve our--"

The intercom clicked. Gene raised his head.

"Authorization confirmed. Quarantine re-commenced. 3..."

Ray stumbled backward. "Bloody hell!"

"2..."

The Doctor's hand shot out from under Gene. He pointed his gadget at the hall and it made a short buzzing sound.

The vault door slammed closed.

"1."

A dull hiss sounded from behind the door. Annie stepped back.

"What's going on in there?" She blinked, eyes wet.

"Quarantine protocol," the Doctor hissed through his teeth. "Torchwood facilities always have one -- you'd have to, playing with things you can't control. Flood the facility with solidifying gas -- kills anything living in seconds, preserves the rest."

"Sam's in there," Annie breathed.

Gene's fists tightened on the Doctor's lapels. The hissing gave way to strange gurgling noises -- cracks. Spreading from the other side of the door to the walls, the ceiling.

Sam was in there.

Gene felt a hand grip his arm. His head snapped down.

"You've already lost one of your own," the Doctor said, too bloody steady, like now that the dam had broke he only needed to tread water. "If you don't let me help, you'll lose the rest."

Gene's hands shuddered. The metal stairwell creaked above him. 

" _Shit,_ " he said.

He threw off the Doctor's lapels. The bastard scrambled up and righted himself, then marched to the far wall like something battle-hardened -- the kind of look some blokes got, walking down the street, and then you knew, they'd been to France, to Germany, they'd flown through burning skies. Soldier more than doctor, this one, though Gene had guessed that from the start.

The Doctor raised his gadget and pointed it at the wall. It made that same buzzing noise and a pair of sliding doors, previously blended in with the concrete, pulled open to reveal the metal cage of a freight lift.

Ray shot Gene a glance. Gene nodded, stiffly, and Ray jogged in with Chris' limp form still in tow. A second later, Annie did the same, hand splayed on the lift's wire-mesh wall as she pressed the other to her mouth.

Gene stepped in, then turned to face the Doctor as he jumped inside and pointed his gadget at the doors.

They slammed closed. The lift whirred, in time with the growing sound of cracks, pressure pushing down on the concrete around the facility's vault door.

They stood in silence. The lift creaked here and there. Its single light flickered.

"What is he?" Annie asked.

Gene raised his eyes to the Doctor. "A damn murderer," he said.

Annie bit her lip. "I meant Sam."

The Doctor tapped his gadget where it dangled against his thigh.

"He's a Time Lord," he said.

Gene grit his teeth. "The hell are you on about?" 

"A time-traveller." Annie let out a breath, like she'd been holding it for years. 

"An ancient species," the Doctor said, "of which there are only two members left in the universe."

"Oh, come off," Ray snorted, though he sounded small, like a boy hearing stories by the fire.

The Doctor stayed rigid. Gene watched him as something churned in his gut -- disgust mixed with fury, mixed with something else. Like when he'd found that ledger in Harry's office and realized he'd known all along, seen the signs, read the writing on the wall. When the impossible had slugged him square in the jaw because he hadn't moved to stop it.

"You're both from Hyde," Gene said, throat dry.

The Doctor stood, silent.

The lift shuddered to a halt. The doors creaked open to the building's derelict kitchen and the Doctor re-animated like sodding Frankenstein, paces quick as he walked out. Gene and Annie followed with Ray at the rear.

"You all need to keep your heads down," the Doctor uttered over his shoulder. "Stay away from the station, your homes -- anywhere Sam would know to look for you."

Annie stopped in her tracks. "You said he was dead."

"He is." The Doctor whirled on them, something fierce in the lines of his face. "That's why he'll try to kill you."

That same chill spread in Gene's chest, that cold, dry tightness.

"What the hell do you mean?"

The building groaned around them. The Doctor turned away and strode toward the door. "I need to hide the TARDIS -- now. All of you, get away, get out of town, and at all costs stay away from _him._ "

"Doctor!" Annie called as he disappeared out the entrance.

"I'll be back for all of you," the Doctor called back at them. "Stay out of harm's way, and I promise -- I'll keep you safe. I'll make this right."

Gene ran for the door. He yanked it open just in time to hear the horrible rusty noise from earlier, the creak and scrape of the blue box fading to nothing.

\---

Chris looked like a corpse, in that hospital bed.

Or worse, like one of those bodies the Mangler had hung from the ceiling. Tubes down his mouth, wheezing, beeping. Sad thing, forgotten by death, left to rot with the living.

Gene took a drag on his cigarette. He pressed a thumb to his brow and rubbed slowly, back and forth, as he leaned harder against the wall.

Annie reached to open the window near her stool, silent, like she hadn't the heart to spout nancy nonsense about the ills of a little smoke. Nearby, Ray slumped forward in a chair, arms dangling off his sides. Dawn hadn't yet peeked over the rooftops outside, but Gene didn't doubt it would soon, way his eyelids were dragging, knees were hurting. He'd already been tired last night, before all this. Tired of things going to shit the minute he turned his back, tired of second-guessing something that should have been fact. Tired of DI Sam Tyler and his buggery, mainly, and wasn't that the kicker? Now he'd never be tired again.

"Wish I'd a better prognosis."

Gene glanced up. Dr. Herman looked back, portly bloke, patchy beard. Gene had always vaguely disliked him, for the same reasons he found him vaguely useful. "Reckon he has concussion, but seems odd, with that little bruising -- heart rate shouldn't be this low. How bad was the hit to his head?"

"Bad." Gene rubbed his palm over his eye.

"Couldn't have been worse than some of the spats you've staggered in from." Dr. Herman chuckled -- because they were all of them bastards, weren't they? Doctors. "Best we can do is keep an eye out. Monitor his status."

Gene didn't answer.

"Has he any family?"

"Mum," Ray mumbled from his chair. "'Round Salford."

"You needn't worry about telling 'em," Gene cut in. "CID will take care of it."

"Oh." Dr. Herman mouthed, brow raised, interest perked. "That sort of police business."

Gene stood from the wall and reached into his pocket.

"Keep it simple," he said, low, on a growl. He pressed a couple of bills into Dr. Herman's hand. "Or you'll get something else from my fist."

Dr. Herman smirked. "Not to worry. All friends here, eh?" He looked down, flipped through the cash, jotted a note on his clipboard. "I'll list him as an 'Alex Hargraves'."

"You do that," Gene said.

Herman nodded, then paced out of the room. The double-doors swung behind him as a chilly draft blew in from the open window.

Ray lowered his head. "We all know why he's not wakin' up'. Why he's not goin' to."

Annie fidgeted with the rustling curtain. "We can't know anything for certain."

"Of course you wouldn't." Ray balled his fists. "You weren't there. You didn't see what Chris said -- what he did."

Gene had. When they'd dragged the Doctor down below, like proper coppers, like the team they were, until they weren't. Until Chris had said, mildly, _"What's this door, then?"_ and then they'd seen it, the bodies, the utter fucking horror of it, worse than Nosferatu night at the cinema, worse than anything Gene had seen before.

And he'd seen a lot.

 _"Sorry, lads,"_ Chris had laughed, high, like a man held at gunpoint, as everything went black. _"Sorry."_

Gene's stomach churned. On the bed, Chris' chest rose and fell in little jerks, like he was just a piece of the ugly machine that breathed into him. Maybe he'd been that way since yesterday. Maybe he always would be, from now on.

The curtain fabric crumpled in Annie's fingers. "Chris came after us too."

"'Us,'" Ray spat. "Meaning you and your precious Boss."

"Sam didn't know," Annie snapped with sudden anger. "Whatever the Doctor was talking about, Sam didn't know a thing before today -- not one."

"Right." Ray chuckled as his mouth split wide. "And you believed him, did you? Just like a bird, then, stupid tart, puttin' fanny before friends--"

Annie stood up, snap, like a mousetrap. Her blue eyes blazed, her hands clenched into fists at her sides. She could have hit him, and not a little slap either. Gene knew what good people looked like, when they were ready to hit. He'd thought about it too much tonight, on that street.

"Cartwright," Gene said.

She looked at him and there were tears, angry and red. She swallowed.

"He was one of us," she said.

Annie lowered her head. She grabbed her purse from the floor and turned around. She walked out the double-doors, flats clicking on the tile like metal, like armor.

"I was right from the start, though, weren't I?" Ray shouted after her. Gene heard him stand up. "Rotten to the core, he was, not a proper copper, proper bloke, not even a proper human being--"

Gene turned around, grabbed him, slammed him back into the chair. He grabbed Ray's shoulder with aching knuckles as he pressed a finger into the breast of his coat.

"The only reason you're here," Gene uttered, "is because Sam Tyler _isn't_."

Ray went silent, stupid. His mouth gaped open. Gene stood up and tried not to shake, tried to push back the wave of pure hollow nothing that threatened to swallow him whole. Something was gone, something nasty and loud, self-righteous and stupid, something bloody important, something that was theirs. It was gone and it wouldn't come back.

Gene turned. He walked out the doors and down the hall.

\---

Gene passed out on the waiting room settee as soon as he hit it. He'd thought it'd be hard, getting some kip on a night like this, but it turned out the only easy thing he'd done all day. He wasn't a stupid neurotic little twit, not like Tyler -- he knew the value of rest, of waking up with your brain working better than a jar of marbles. Right now, that was bloody far from the case.

No dreams -- settee was too damn stiff for that. Gene tossed and turned and was happy for it.

He felt a hand shake his shoulder after some stretch of time.

"Police," he mumbled. "Official business."

"I know, Guv," Annie said.

Gene cracked an eye open. She stood over him, a silhouette against the cheerful daylight streaming in through the window.

Gene grunted as he propped himself up on one elbow. "Time is it?"

"Quarter past ten." Annie sat down in the neighboring seat and pulled a thermos from her purse. She popped off the cup-top. "I've got tea and biscuits."

Gene scowled at her. "Trainin' for the Olympics event of being me mum?"

Annie shrugged. "Thought you'd be hungry."

She wasn't wrong. Gene sat up and rubbed a bastard big crick in his neck as he watched Annie pour tea into the cup. She'd changed clothes, washed the blood out of her hair.

"Fine time to stop home," Gene muttered. "Women." 

Annie shook her head. "Went to my sister's." She paused, tapped the side of the thermos. "I... wanted to tell her to leave for holiday, next few days. She'll be in London."

She offered the cup to Gene, but he didn't take it.

Gene narrowed his eyes. "You believe that rubbish, then. What that bastard said."

Annie looked back, steady. "Have you rung your wife, Guv?"

Gene didn't answer for a moment. Then he leaned forward and took the cup.

"No need," he said. "She isn't home."

He could see Annie working it out, from the corner of his eye. She wasn't the stupid sort of bird. He drank his tea.

"Oh," she mouthed. Her face softened. "Oh, Guv, I'm..."

Gene winced like he'd tasted something foul. "Bloody Nora," he hissed as he reached into his jacket. He pulled out his flask, uncapped it, poured a measure of whiskey into the thermos cup. He only realized upon downing it that Annie was gazing at him with nothing less than ridiculous, revolting pity.

Sam had gotten that same stupid look, down in the morgue the other week -- sad circumstance of giving people the bloody facts. Not that it wasn't Gene's own fault, talking about that, about Stu, but he'd never done it before. Never had a problem with people thinking him the scum of the Earth, never felt like giving reasons. And Gene knew -- he knew like a kick to the gut that he would've done it again. If Sam had sat in Annie's spot, peddling tea like a nancy maid, Gene would've told him about that night, about Stu, about Percy Lane. When the alarms had sounded and a stupid boy had got frightened, when he'd left his brother out there in the cold.

They'd left Sam down there in the cold.

"I should have said something, Guv," Annie said. "I should have said something ages ago."

Gene raised his head. "What's that?"

"About Sam." Annie bit her lip, wrapped her hands round the thermos. "It's not his fault. He didn't know better, but I did. I put us all in danger, keeping it to myself."

"Keeping what to yourself?" Gene's brow lifted. "That he thought he'd jumped ship from Tomorrowland?"

Annie's head snapped up. She gaped. "You knew?"

Gene dropped the empty cup on the waiting room table. He sat back in his chair, scratched at a piece of blood that had crusted up near his ear.

"Mostly. Tony Crane started it. Blathering in the lift tonight settled it -- and yes, Cartwright," Gene growled as he raised his eyes to hers, "you could have dropped the anvil before we were standing right bloody under it."

Annie set the thermos down. She smoothed out her skirt with a shaky hand. "I know. I'm sorry. I was trying to keep him safe."

Gene let out a laugh. "Good job of that."

It was cruel, and it should have been. They both deserved it.

And now the next bit, the hard bit. Gene found himself reaching for his flask again with stony fingers. Everything up until now was the product of stupidity, pure human error. Horrible but utterly average, the kind of thing you woke up carrying, heavy as a horse, but a bit easier every day. You learned to live with it, eat with it, sleep with it. That was life.

But the things they'd seen, that they'd heard -- you didn't. You didn't see a police box disappear and shrug it off as bad business, didn't forget that your possessed DC had murdered a girl by next Christmas. Didn't go six stories underground on the street you'd grown up on, didn't see the stuff of science fiction and think, "That's grand -- is it lunchtime?" 

Those things changed you. They turned you. Gene had seen it in Annie, in Ray, these past hours. Talking to doctors and nurses like they were only half there, like there was a kind of glass pane between them. Walking with a little march in their step, equal parts furious and deadly quiet. It frightened Gene, because he knew in his bones -- he was like that now too.

Like Sam.

Probably best that Lily had gone out to the country. They had even less in common now.

Gene leaned forward and drank from his flask, then shook it a bit to gauge the contents. It was nearly empty.

"Tell me, Cartwright," he muttered. "What were you lovebirds really chatting about, all those halcyon days?"

Before, Annie might have got flustered. Now, she just shook her head. "Not much more than you know. I suppose Sam complained, mainly--"

"I am aghast with shock," Gene said.

"--about how different it was, how different _he_ was. He talked about... I don't know. Things I thought were made up, before last night -- phones without wires, computers on desks -- an intro-net?"

Gene frowned. "That a football penalty?"

"He thought Vic Tyler was his father." Annie looked down. "That was the worst bit. Thought that he was his son -- that little boy -- from thirty-three years in the future."

Gene took this in for a second, not because it was hard to swallow, but because it was easy. "That's why he lost his sodding mind, that case."

Annie nodded. "He thinks... he thought he was in a coma, that we were all a big dream of his." She folded her hands over each other. Her voice got quieter still. "He was obsessed with 'waking up.' I... had to talk him off the edge of the station roof, when he first got here."

Gene stiffened. It was the first nugget of information that had ram-rocketed through his learned expertise on Tyleresque nuttery. "You didn't think to _mention_ this?"

"Didn't think I should." Annie dug her fingers into her knees. "We didn't know him then, Guv. If I'd reported, Discipline would've ordered him out the door and you would've let them."

"And maybe I should have!" Gene stood, livid. "Did you think a dose of your girly 'psychology' would make him better? Did you actually think you could _fix_ him?"

For a second, Annie sat, stricken, the way people did when Gene threw a rock and a sharp edge cut through skin.

"I didn't--" she tried.

"You did," Gene snarled, pointing at her. "You took it upon yourself like Sainted Bloody Mary and now look at the state of things."

Annie's face hardened. She stood up to meet him, adamant, resolute. 

"And what if I hadn't? How many criminals would have gotten away? How many innocent people would have been hurt?" She stopped, breathed hard. "How many favors would you be doing for Warren, Guv?"

Gene's expression didn't change. He knew sure of that. He'd worked hard at that.

He lowered his hand, clenched it into a fist. Nearby, a few waiting patients peered at the scene, over their magazines and morning papers.

Gene's head snapped toward them. "Oi! Is this a tourist attraction?"

All eyes collectively darted back down.

Gene turned back to Annie and gauged her. She was shaking but she hadn't budged.

At length, he shoved his hands in his coat pockets. He jerked his head and walked out of the waiting room into the empty hall nearby.

Annie followed. Gene looked back at her.

"What about the Doctor?" he asked in a low voice.

Annie let out a breath. "Sam didn't know anything. Didn't know about the Doctor until we did, never mentioned 'Time Lords' or... or anything about--" she swallowed, "--aliens."

Gene took a moment to absorb how ridiculous his life had become. Even in death, Sam Tyler was a singular source of untold misery.

Gene crossed his arms over this chest. "He knew something, by the time I saw him."

Annie frowned. "How do you mean?"

"Babbling. Nonsense. 'Only I can save you.'" Gene shrugged. "Usual Tyler tripe, 'cept the other times he wasn't ready to off himself."

Gene chose to ignore Annie's silence. He rubbed his eye.

"Is... is that what it was like, then--"

"It was shit, was what it was," Gene snapped back, low. The waiting room wouldn't hear him. "Bastard didn't have the common decency to spell out a sodding thing, cacking riddles, the whole lot of it -- from 'the Doctor' Jekyll and DI Hyde--"

"What happened?" Annie pressed, annoyingly gentle. "What exactly did he tell you?"

"Hell if I know." Gene shoved his hand into his jacket pocket and reached for a cigarette. "Said to tell you 'sorry', for one -- supposing for all the times he failed to satisfy in the sack."

He took out his lighter and flicked it. The flame shook as he cupped it to his mouth.

"Is he really dead, Guv?" Annie whispered.

Gene inhaled smoke, breathed it out.

"He said that whatever came out of that room wouldn't be him anymore." Gene pocketed the lighter. It clinked against his flask. "Whatever the hell that means. All I know is a man doesn't act the way he did 'less he knows he's at the gallows."

Annie considered this for a moment. Her brow knotted. "He said... something odd last night. When he told me about -- about how he'd gone to the future, with the Doctor."

"What, the bit about _going to the future with the Doctor?_ "

Annie shook her head. "'Futures' and 'pasts' -- that's normal sort of talk from him. But this time, he said something like... 'I don't think I'm me' -- something about people treating him like -- like he was a..."

She trailed off, then pressed a hand over her eyes. Firm but delicate, way Lily used to when she didn't want a row.

"I don't know," she said.

Gene blew out more smoke. "That makes two of us."

The doors down the hall slammed open. Gene turned to see Ray marching down it, radio in hand.

"Guv, you'd better listen--"

"Calling all units," Phyllis' voice streamed from the speaker, "bomb threat called in on A-Division HQ. Repeat, this is not a drill..."

Annie met Gene's eyes, then ran to grab her bag.

\---

The Cortina's tires squealed to a halt in front of the plod waving them down. Gene would've admired the officer not shirking away from a speeding vehicle on any other day, stiff upper lip of the Queen's finest and all that.

Any other day.

"Oi!" Gene shouted out the window. "DCI Hunt, here!"

"Sorry, Guv -- keepin' to the blast perimeter." The plod leaned down toward the window, sympathetic -- young lad, PC Ramsey was his name. "Orders."

Gene wrenched his car into reverse. He screeched back a scant few feet before zig-zagging the stick back to park.

Annie and Ray didn't waste any time piling out. "Who's in charge?" Annie called over the roof of the car as she slammed the door.

"WPC Hobbs has been running the emergency frequency -- she'd know better, marm." Outside the confines of the Cortina, the wailing sirens of several patrol cars nearly drowned Ramsey's words. "Everyone's on high alert--"

"And high volume!" Gene barked back. He shouldered past Ramsey and toward the mass of police tape and stanchions lining the pavement opposite the station. "We trying to go deaf before we explode?"

His voice must have been loud enough to carry over the din, because he caught Phyllis' head turn from where she stood at the back end of a police van. She shouted something into the radio, then waved a hand at a patrol car.

"Oi! Can't hear a bloody thing, you clods!"

The nearest siren honked, then went quiet. Phyllis grit her teeth as she marched toward them. "Where in Satan's back end have the lot of you been?"

"Busy," Gene grunted. His eyes scanned the plods running round the tape, the idiot onlookers crowding nearby, the pudgy old inspectors wandering in a daze after years in a cushy office.

Phyllis grit her teeth. "Busy. Busy!"

Gene heard Annie and Ray stop behind him. Ray fumed. "If you knew half the bollocks we've--"

Gene raised a hand to shut him up. "What the hell's happened here, then?"

"Exactly what it looks like." Phyllis waved an arm at the people rushing to-and-fro around them. "Call came in roundabouts an hour ago -- lunatic said he'd blow the station sky-high 'less we met demands."

Gene grit his teeth. "And we're draggin' everyone out so the bastard can waltz right in?"

Phyllis shook her head. "That's the scary bit. Call came through the station switchboard -- he's in the building, Guv."

Gene slowly raised his eyes to the station. It stood firm and familiar, robust in its rain-stained exterior, its ugly grey walls. Looking at it, you could almost forget the world had gone upside down.

"What demands?" Annie's voice cut through.

Phyllis' face darkened. She stepped closer and lowered her voice. "First, you answer me why the hell John Smith disappeared from my cells last night."

 _Tyler,_ Gene wanted to say, with the utmost fury he could squash into the word. Instead, he looked back at her flatly. "Think the bastard prefers 'Doctor'."

"Exactly," Phyllis hissed. "Bomber called himself 'the Doctor' over the phone. Higher-ups don't know, 'aven't put two and two together, but--"

"What!" Ray cried.

"Th-that's not right." Annie stammered as she shook her head. "Whatever the Doctor is, I don't think he's a--"

"Oh, he's a right murderer," Gene spat. He felt the weight on his belt where his pistol sat. "Ask Tyler."

Annie went quiet. Phyllis rolled her eyes.

"Least he was 'round this mornin' to see things go pear-shaped. Right, so--"

Gene barely heard himself. "What?"

"DI Tyler." Phyllis waved Gene off, annoyed. "Orderin' everyone about, per usual. Sure he'll stride on back and say we did his 'doughnut' wrong -- someone ought to do _his_ doughnut, see how he--"

Gene stepped forward. He pointed at the ground. Voices buzzed, indiscernible, around him.

"DI Tyler. Is here?"

Phyllis twisted her mouth. "Well, was. Idiot went in with the crew to check for stragglers."

"Guv," Annie said, soft.

"Been a while, actually," Phyllis said.

Gene remembered a day, years ago, when he'd strode up to a run-down carcass of a building. He'd knocked on the door and he'd curled his lip at the woman who'd opened it, skin and bones, ratty hair, teeth crooked and rotten from one habit too many.

"Stuart Hunt, where is he," he'd said, one part copper and the rest just bloody tired.

The woman had looked back with big yellow eyes, and when she'd shook her head and said, "He looked like you," something had gone still in him, like a domino before the fall, like a landslide, like everything and nothing at all.

This wasn't like that. He doubted -- had chosen -- that nothing would ever be.

But it was close.

"Right," Gene said. He turned and headed toward his car.

A moment later, Annie's pitter-patter footsteps followed. "Guv--"

"I want you back at the hospital," Gene said, "with Chris."

Her footsteps stopped. "Where are you going?"

Gene yanked open the door to the passenger's side and pulled open the glovebox. He tugged out his box of revolver ammo, started counting bullets, cursed and stuffed a handful into his coat pocket.

"Guv," Annie repeated, slow, "where are you going?"

"In." Gene closed the glovebox, slammed the door.

Annie stood in front of him, hand shaking on her purse strap.

"Something's wrong," she said.

"Was it the sirens what tipped you off?" Gene shouldered past her. He eyed the plods around them and wondered how best he could march past the lot of them, which decrepit old codger with a grudge he should try most to avoid -- and felt Annie grab his sleeve.

Gene froze. He turned. She looked back at him, jaw clenched.

"We don't _know_ , Guv."

Gene looked back at her a full second. He yanked away and stepped toward her, pointed his finger at her pale little face.

"You. Hospital. That clear, WDC?"

He held her gaze long enough, let the dark vowels of his voice sink in deep enough. She swallowed and looked away.

"Good girl," Gene said.

He turned away from her and fixed his eyes on the back entrance, where he supposed there'd be some coverage but not enough to stop a mousey plod from letting him past when he demanded it.

He passed by Ray and tapped his shoulder. "Come on."

It was only when Gene didn't hear Ray's clops behind him that he realized he wasn't following. Gene turned and found his DS stock-still, worrying a stretch of sideburns with his palm.

"Sure 'bout that, Guv?"

"No, on me way to the joke festival." Gene grit his teeth. "Ray, no one but us has a horror nights' idea what they're--"

"The Doctor told us not to go near 'im." Ray pursed his lips, fixed his eyes on the ground. "The Boss, I mean. 'Course, could be the Doctor's the bomber, but supposin' not..."

 _Bomber._ Gene's jaw clenched. He remembered, with sudden glass clarity, Ray's jaunty gait as he approached the explosive-rigged car naught but a couple of months ago.

Gene let out a breath. He turned back toward the station.

"Right. You'll stay here and help Phyllis wrangle this mess."

Gene hated the relief that rippled across Ray's face. "What about you--"

"You have your orders, Carling."

Gene marched toward the maintenance entrance. Part of him wanted to yell at his DS, call him a coward and a jessie and a bloody disgrace.

The rest of him thought, _Damn the man, he has an ounce of sense after all._

\---

Station could be quiet sometimes. Late at night when the skeleton crew kicked in, with nothing left but the odd clattering of a typewriter, the scratch of pencil on paper. No men 'round except for the ones who cared to get things done -- good time for Gene to sink his knuckles into some bastard downstairs, or failing that, catch some kip on his settee.

He could sleep in the quiet of his station, worn and dirty and safe. He couldn't sleep in this.

Every scuff his shoes made against the ground sounded like nails down a board. He kept his fingers tight on his Colt, his footfalls hard and steady in the silence. He should have felt good and brave, it being so bright outside, direct rays of morning light burning through the hallway windows and casting white-hot bands on the ground. Should have felt good and brave, being DCI Hunt, except DCI Hunt knew what had sent Ray running like a pissing dog, what had compelled Cartwright to sink her fingers into his arm the way she'd never dared before.

Instinct. Pure and simple, old as the day. An animal knew when it had eyes on it, when a predator prowled in the dark. When men were apes and lived in trees, they looked down and knew -- it wasn't safe, down below.

There lived things with claws, and teeth.

Gene remembered Sam's face, pale and haggard. Trapped up in his own tree, his own hunter closing in.

_"Whatever comes out of this room, it won't be me anymore."_

"Sodding hell does that mean." Gene's elbow slammed the stairwell door open. No one there. "Sodding _hell._ "

He could have lied, could have told himself this was new and strange, trying to sift anger and grief out of each other like grains of sand from a jar of rocks. But he remembered that day, the old woman at the door. And while Gene Hunt called himself many things, a liar wasn't one of them.

Gene heard a noise up above. He froze and listened harder. A cough, unfamiliar one. He grit his teeth and climbed the stairs to the next level, then the next. CID's floor. He didn't have time to feel the dread of it.

Gene shoved the door open and nearly slipped when he did, shoe sliding in a puddle on the tile. He grasped the door frame with one hand and steadied his footing in the split second it took him to realize there was red on the ground -- all over the ground.

"Shit," Gene muttered, because what else could he do. What the hell else could a DCI do when he saw bloodstains lining his own fucking hall, bodies of officers crumpled against the walls like broken dolls. He didn't budge for a second, got by the balls by the same terror as in the Mangler's body room, but this time worse, a thousand times worse. This was home.

That same cough, on the near side of choking. Gene jerked his head to the side and saw one of the bodies raise its arm, then drop it again.

Gene ran over, slid to a stop. "Oi!" he shouted at the man on the ground -- PC Nichols, one of the seasoned plods. Gene grabbed him by the shoulder, wishing, suddenly, he'd brought along Cartwright and her nursey skill set after all.

Nichols' hand snapped up and clasped Gene's arm in a horrible vice. His eyes bugged out as he gasped for air.

"Guv," he rasped, "Guv, he killed us, he killed us, Guv--"

"Steady," Gene said. He heard a chair scrape against the ground inside the bullpen. His own grip tightened. "C'mon, then, let's get you--"

Nichols yanked Gene's shoulder toward him as he coughed out spittle and blood. "Still in there -- said he wanted -- Guv, he wanted--"

The door creaked behind them. Something whirred.

A beam of light shot through Nichol's head. It dropped limp against his shoulder.

Gene turned. It was almost normal, how Sam stood in the bullpen doorway, how he tossed a poncy gadget up in the air and caught it, once, twice, again.

Sam smiled brightly. He narrowed his eyes.

"Hiya, Guv."


	11. II: The Seeker | ii

ii.

_I asked Bobby Dylan_   
_I asked the Beatles_   
_I asked Timothy Leary_   
_but he couldn't help me either_

\---

The words fell out of his mouth.

"You're posh."

"Oh, I'm lots of things, turns out." Sam grinned and caught his gadget mid-flip. "Murderer, obviously, though I suppose mass-murderer is more apt -- serial killer? No, too crass -- slaughter enthusiast?"

Nichols' dead body slid out of Gene's hands and onto the ground.

"They called me 'The Decimator' for a year." Sam scratched his chin. "That was nice -- though 'His Lordship' was even better, I think--"

"What the hell is this?" Gene rose to his feet, fists shaking, voice catching in his chest. "Tyler--"

Something slammed into him, into his lungs. Gene fell back to his knees, wheezing, as his palms hit the wet concrete.

Sam's heels clicked on the floor, then stopped in front of him. He crouched down and yanked Gene's gun from its holster.

"Gene, Gene." Sam's voice tut-tutted above him as he tossed it away. "You're out of your league."

Gene raised his head. Sam smiled down, serene, and that's what did it -- that's what shattered it all, turned the mirror to the dirty side, smacked him upside the head. Sam had never been bloody serene.

"You came out of that room," Gene muttered.

Sam's mouth mock-pouted. "Look -- he's trying so hard."

" _You,_ " Gene repeated, low, "came out of that room."

Sam's arms flew up in feigned surrender. "I'm caught. Please, officer -- don't hurt me!"

Gene moved to stand. Sam's hand whipped out his gadget.

"There are explosives in all four corners of this building," Sam's voice said, one chilling octave lower. "This is the detonator."

Gene's fists clenched against the ground. "You'd go too."

"So would all your little detectives." Sam's smile split into a grin. "Shame if DI Tyler made a miscalculation, put that perimeter just a little too close. Damn shame."

Gene grit his teeth. He raised his eyes as Sam -- Sam, in his worn leather jacket, his poncy flared collar, the little gift shop medallion that swung around his neck -- stepped back and strolled into the bullpen.

Gene stood and followed. Sam dropped into his usual chair and kicked his Cuban boots up on his desk. He crossed his arms across his chest and shoved a pile of papers off with his heel.

They fell to the floor like leaves, typewritten pages, stupid memo pad scribbles. Scattered pieces of someone. Ashes.

"Who the hell are you," Gene said.

"The Master." The thing wearing Sam's skin grabbed for the tape recorder on his desk. "Music?"

He pressed down the play button. Paul McCartney started belting out chipper lyrics from what had been one of Sam's interview tapes. Gene dug his fingers into the seatback of the nearest chair.

"Thought 'the Doctor' was ridiculous enough."

"Oh, he is." The Master leaned forward, one hand on his knee. "He is utterly ridiculous, and I'm about to prove it to him."

A spark lit up his eyes, familiar fire. _"Let me show you how clever I really am."_

Gene's mouth went dry. "You're the bastard playing Beatles after murder."

The Master canted his head. "Thought you told me to cheer up, Guv."

"Go to hell." Gene stepped forward and the Master raised his detonator. Rage flooded Gene's vision, his words. "Where is he? Where the hell's my DI?"

The Master paused, then smiled. He leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms behind his head.

"Hello, hello," he sang with the music on the tape. "I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello."

Steps pitter-pattered up the stairwell. Gene's head snapped toward the bullpen doors.

The Master stood. A door creaked out in the hall. Someone gasped -- a bird.

"Annie, get _out!_ " Gene shouted. The Master's unseen force slammed into him again and he fell on his stomach. He gasped, winded.

Annie shoved through the doors, gun raised. Through bleary vision, Gene watched her face go pale.

"Sam...!"

"The little lady, right on schedule." The Master raised his gadget in the air and it let out four high-pitched beeps. Out in the corridor, something rustled.

"Sam..." Annie's voice trembled as her eyes darted between him and Gene. "Sam, what's..."

"It's not him!" Gene gasped. He slammed his fist on the floor. "Cartwright, shoot--!"

A figure burst through the bullpen doors behind her. Annie whipped around and Nichols' body from the corridor bloody _hit_ her, knocked the pistol out of her hands. Gene could see the hole through his head as he grabbed her and yanked her arms behind her back. His eyes stared forward, glassy.

Lennon and Harrison sang happily. _"Hello, goodbye, hello, goodbye..."_

Annie yelled, kicked. Nichols didn't budge. The Master hit the tape player and it stopped, abrupt, sending the room into silence. He kept his gadget trained on Gene as he approached Annie.

"Brilliant, isn't it?" The Master grinned. His heels clicked on the floor. "Playing with dead things -- fun and practical!"

Annie breathed hard. The Master tapped the back of his neck with his free hand. "Plant a little chip just _so_ in their neural cortex, and... voila! Henchmen who follow without question because -- well, let's face it, they've not much to lose."

Gene managed to get to his knees. The Master clicked something on his gadget as he approached Annie.

She shook her head, wide-eyed. "Sam," she whispered, "please... god, Sam, if you're there--"

The Master struck Annie across the face. She yelled. Gene wrenched himself up, slammed his hand on the nearest desk.

"You keep your fucking hands off her, you murdering _bastard_ \--"

The Master clicked his device again, then gazed down at it with a grin.

"Oh," he said, "that worked nicely."

Gene roared and lunged at him. The Master flicked his gadget back toward him, didn't even look in his direction as Gene went flying and slammed against the side of Chris' desk.

"Guv!" Annie shouted.

"That's right." Gene's ears rang with Sam's warped voice as his palms slid against the floor. "Kiddie gloves off -- I've got what I need from you pathetic pair. Only fun and games keeping you alive -- for now."

Annie let out a breath. Gene raised his head to see the Master lean in toward her. He bared his teeth, ran a finger down the red mark on her cheek.

He tapped it gently, four times.

"Playing with dead things. My favorite."

Sound hit the air -- scratching and scraping. The papers on the floor rustled with wind.

The Master turned from Annie. He watched for a moment, then stepped toward the light that tore through the center of the room, chin high, shoulders proud. Something spread across his features, sly and smug. Like when he won a round of cards, Gene thought with a horrible wrench to the gut. Like when he won a bloody round of cards.

The light changed shape, solidified into something real, man-shaped. The Master's expression shifted from triumph to disappointment. He curled his lip.

"You left your car in the garage."

"Yes, _well,_ " said the shape as the light died away and turned into a gangly bastard in a longcoat, "your time pocket trap is only as good as my teleportation array is bad, meaning -- well. Here I am, aren't I?"

"Hm," the Master said. He pointed his gadget and shot the Doctor in the leg.

The Doctor yelped and fell on his side, grasping his thigh where it sizzled from the impact. He scrabbled against the ground and groped under his coat before a look of horror crossed his features.

The Master raised a second device, deadpan. "Looking for this?"

The Doctor sputtered. "How did you--"

"Ask your teleportation array." The Master dropped the Doctor's device to the floor, then pointed his own at it. The Doctor's gadget exploded into bits and pieces.

Gene closed his eyes. The back of his head hit the desk behind him.

"Can you do anything without making a mess of it?"

The Doctor looked at Gene, stricken. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I'll fix this--"

The Master stormed toward him, dragged him up by the collar, slammed him into a chair.

"Sorry?" the Master hissed into the Doctor's face." _Sorry?_ Is that all you have to say for yourself, you self-righteous, catastrophic prick--"

"You left me no choice!" The Doctor shouted through a grimace. "Do you think I wanted to? Do you think, if there was any other way--"

"You could have killed me." The Master's rage twisted into a grin. "But oh, no, not the Doctor. He has to make people better, doesn't he? Blood spills and bodies drop, but the Doctor walks out clean as Rassilon's sheets--" 

The Doctor yelled something back, but Gene shut it out as he grunted and grabbed his aching shoulder with his throbbing hand. His eyes slid over and met Annie's across the room. She swallowed, still trapped by Nichols' dead arms, still struggling in his grasp.

She mouthed something at him. _Gun._ She nodded to where hers had fallen near the door.

Gene thought, _Flash-knickers, you angel._

"--dare put this on anyone but yourself," the Doctor growled. "You're a bloody psychopath, you've already killed today!"

"Five." The Master grinned. "About to be seven, and there wouldn't have been any, would there, if you'd kept me locked up nice and tight--"

"You _were_ locked up!" the Doctor yelled.

"Was I?" The Master leaned toward him. "Was I really?"

Gene tore his eyes away, fixed them on the gun lying on the ground. He slid himself slowly in its direction.

Sam's stupid posh voice carried on behind him. "Didn't you think it odd, how quickly the Chameleon Arch homed in on a time and place to put me?"

"I--" the Doctor tried.

"Of course you didn't. You scavenged some memories from a coma ward and thought -- 'oh, lovely, precious Master can learn to be a wuvvy-duvvy bobby!'"

Gene paused a second, curled his nails into his palm. Annie had stopped struggling, stopped making noise. Her eyes darted between him and them.

"You tried to sabotage the TARDIS," the Doctor grated out. "I gave you a chance and--"

"I did sabotage it." The Master grinned. "And you found out. Sloppy. So sloppy. Very unlike me."

The Doctor went silent. Gene started sliding to his feet.

"You planted tachyon particles," the Doctor whispered. The Master didn't respond, leaving the Doctor to go on, "as a safety measure, when you were PM--"

"Minister of Defence, actually." The Master's feet scraped against the ground and Gene turned, teeth grit. The Master's back still faced them. "That little construction site you found your TARDIS parked at yesterday, 2008? Was my own classified project -- convenient, to build a top-secret facility, particularly when unloading time-unstable material--"

"Unstable enough to reversely degenerate on a timeline and form a psychic field at that exact location in the past, which..." The Doctor raised his head. "Which would attract a TARDIS right to it."

" _And_ nosy Torchwood idiots, _and_ amplify the power of any psychic entities in close proximity, like -- oh, I don't know, a Time Lord Chameleon Bowie tape."

Somewhere between "tachyon" and "David Bowie", Gene had stopped trying to make sense of whatever bollocks-arsed chat ex-Sam and his boyfriend were having. He kept his attention on their movements instead, back against a file cabinet as he sidled closer to the pistol.

"See, Doctor..." The Master crouched down to meet him at eye level. "That's what I love about you. Smart enough to appreciate a Machiavellian ploy, stupid enough to fall for it."

Gene heard something creak behind him. He whirled around--

And took a fist to the mouth. He staggered, crashed into a chair. Two hands gripped his arms and yanked them behind his back as cold metal snapped around his wrists.

"...As opposed to stupid enough to interrupt a Machiavellian ploy and stupid enough to fall for it -- really, Hunt," the Master hissed as he glared over his shoulder, "as if I don't know your tiny little brain."

"You don't," Gene growled back. He wrestled against the second zombie as it dropped him to the ground. "You don't know a damn thing, you sodding--"

"Is it because I made you promise to stop me?"

Gene's words stopped. His blood went cold. At the edge of his vision, Annie raised her head.

"No... no, wait." The Master turned to face him. He laughed Sam's laugh, his fucking laugh, and pointed joyfully with his device. "This is about your brother, isn't it?"

"Stop," Gene said.

"You couldn't save him, so you have to save me -- oh, that's..." Sam's laugh came out again, a little giggle, as he slapped his leg with one hand. "That's spectacular--"

"I'll kill you where you stand," came out of Gene's chest, dark, primal, so deep it almost scared him. His wrists rattled the police cuffs. "I will _kill_ you."

The Master straightened and waved him off. "You can't." He jerked his thumb at the Doctor. "And he won't."

He turned toward the Doctor, who'd gone still, pale.

The Master grinned. "You really, really won't."

"You don't know that," the Doctor said, quiet.

"Don't I?" The Master strolled to the desk next to the Doctor and leaned a hand on its surface. "Mr. Metal Fingers--"

"You're making assumptions," the Doctor shot back. "Stupid assumptions -- as if Time Lords can't regenerate limbs--"

"Time Lords use perception filters. Time Lords know when things will happen, know when a powerful psychic might be most vulnerable, when they could dig in the deepest--"

"I would never." The Doctor shook his head, voice low, furious. "I would _never_ violate someone like that--"

"You would." The Master drummed his fingers against the desktop. "A future version of you already did."

Gene twisted his mouth. "Sodding hell are you on about?"

"Nothing that concerns you," the Master hissed back.

"Master," the Doctor breathed, "you have to believe me--"

" _You_ don't believe you." The Master raised his hand and continued the tapping on his own temple. "Whoever slipped into my head that night knew it like the back of their hand. Tell me, Doctor, how much work did your little Chameleon Arch trick take? Implants of human memories, psychic filters to project the drums as hallucinations, and then -- true stroke of genius, this -- placing your masterpiece in the wrong era as a distraction from itself..."

The Doctor grit his teeth. "I had. No. Choice."

The Master leaned toward him. "Will you have a choice in 2008, Doctor? Will you raise one hand and weigh the lives lost today, the many more to come -- will you still knock down that door, will you cradle me close, will you dive into a mind you know better than any other and sacrifice a piece of yourself, Doctor, even yourself, for this--"

The Master reached forward, grasped the Doctor's hand, pressed it to his own cheek. Gene ripped his eyes away because bloody hell--

"--for this."

Gene's mind raced, wondered where he'd seen that look on the Doctor's face before, that wide-eyed, stupid stare, and he remembered -- Lost and Found. Beating the bastard raw, and the Doctor watching Sam--

Sam.

Gene looked up. In front of him, Sam smiled back at the Doctor same as he had back then, with that darkness in him, that same ragged, beaten edge. Happy Hitler, Gene thought, worn to the bone.

Sam's smile widened. "You're shaking."

The Doctor whispered, "You're mad."

"And you want to fix it so much it hurts." The Master laced his fingers in-between the Doctor's on his cheek. "You have the key to my subconscious. You could stop me _right now_... and you can't even bring yourself to try. 'Dodona rejection is so ugly,' you tell yourself. 'If I'm not the one who planted it, it'll splinter both our minds.'"

The Doctor swallowed. His fingers tensed.

Gene thought, _You coward._

The Master pulled the Doctor's hand away from his face.

"You won't ever dare," the Master said. "But I know. And I'll kill, Doctor, I'll kill so many for you, in your honor. You'll cry for them all."

"Please--" the Doctor said.

"And one day, you'll break. One day, you'll take this--" he pressed the end of his device into the Doctor's palm, "and you'll set it to something regeneration won't heal. You'll prove to yourself you're the one who can shape my mind the only way you know how. You'll hate yourself as you go to the appointed place and time, as you step into that flat in 2008 and save me all the same."

The Doctor sucked in a breath, deep and harsh. The Master shook his head, clicked his tongue.

"The only way to save them... will be to let me kill them."

"Is that all you do?" Annie asked.

Gene froze. He turned his head. She stood in front of Nichols, arms still trapped behind her back, gaze fixed on the Master like it must've been the whole time.

"Kill people, hurt them for fun." Annie pursed her lips. "Is that all you do?"

Gene stared at her. _Bloody hell are you doing?_

"Cute _and_ sassy," the Master muttered to the Doctor, unconcerned. "Just the way you like them. You'd have tossed her into your box on sight, I wager -- shame she won't be around much longer."

"Are you afraid to look at me?"

The Master paused. He grit his teeth and rolled his eyes back toward her.

"Cartwright..." Gene growled.

"I mean it," Annie continued, stubborn, steady. "You've barely looked at me. Is that why?"

The Master paused. The side of his mouth lit up with a smile that rang a whole new set of warning bells through Gene's skull, bloody blitzkrieg sirens.

"Is that why." The Master turned to grin at the Doctor. "'Is that _why._ "

"Don't." The Doctor shook his head. His hands went back to his injured leg and he dug his fingers in. "Please, Master, I'm the one who did this, punish _me_ \--"

"Let me tell you a story." The Master faced Annie again. "About the man who never was."

Gene's wrists twisted inside the cuffs. "I've got one about the bastard who murdered coppers!"

The Master ignored him. _Shit,_ Gene thought, _buggering shit,_ as the Master approached Annie, step by step.

He laughed quietly. "Dear little Annie -- do you think you'll wake your prince with a true love's kiss?"

Annie tensed. One of her heels scraped the ground as the Master stopped in front of her.

"Is this another nightmare to pull him out of? Another broken thought to mend?"

"You've killed people," Annie whispered. "Our friends--"

"Not his." The Master shrugged. "You saw that -- how little he noticed, how little he cared. Closest he came to giving a damn was you and the oaf over there."

Something tightened in Gene's chest. "Oi!" he yelled.

Annie raised her head to meet the Master's gaze, something fierce in the lines of her face. "Sam Tyler was a good man."

"Yes," the Doctor cut in. He tried to stand and hissed through his teeth when he couldn't. "Sam Tyler was good, Yana was good -- Master, you're capable of so much better--"

"Oh, shut up." The Master flicked his device and the Doctor slammed back into his seat. Strange bands of light snapped over his front, like electric chair straps.

Annie searched the Master's face.

"You're in there, aren't you?"

The Master raised a brow. Annie bit her lip. "Sam -- you have to... please, you have to _fight_ this--"

"Do you know how old I am?" the Master asked.

Annie blinked. The Master ran his thumb down the length of his device and Gene's hands clenched, his mind raced. Around his wrists were cuffs. Not whatever alien bollocks what was holding the Doctor down, just cuffs, simple, copper's lock and key--

Annie narrowed her eyes. "I don't..."

"One-thousand, two-hundred and seventy-five." The Master smiled and outstretched his arms. "Relative to you, I was born when the Arabs sacked Carthage. In linear time, I learned to chart the stars when trilobites roamed your seas."

Annie shook her head. "Those are words, bloody words -- Sam, we're your _friends_ \--"

"Eight months." The Master's voice went cold. "Eight of your pathetic Earth months, stuck in a pathetic Earth shape, and an insect like you has the idiocy -- the utter blind arrogance to think yourself more than a smear on my windscreen."

Annie's voice shook, like a little girl's. "You haven't killed us yet."

Gene grit his teeth. _Key, key, sodding key._ He wrenched his neck around to see the puppet-corpse of PC Maxwell hunched over behind him, the lining of one of his uniform pockets yanked out halfway.

Gene's eyes darted to the ground. The key glinted amongst the floor's dust, just beneath him.

Gene's fingers scrabbled backward for the key, finding it, fumbling it. Maxwell's corpse didn't react. Gene halfway registered the Master leaning toward Annie, pulling her hand from Nichols' grasp and holding it in his own.

Gene twisted his palm, clicked the key into the slot. He turned it--

"Do... do you feel them, Annie?"

Gene froze. He raised his eyes to see Sam clasping Annie's hand to his chest, brow creased, frown deep. He spoke again, way he always did.

"Both my hearts are beating, so yours doesn't have to."

Annie blinked. A tear rolled down her cheek.

"Oh, Sam," she whispered.

Sam's brow smoothed.

"Doctor!" the Master called over his shoulder, "Doctor, I think she gets it! Oh, and just in time."

He clicked his device. The Beatles started up on the tape recorder again, loud, tinny. Drums echoed off the walls.

_"Hey-la, hey, hello-ah..."_

The Master tightened his grip on Annie's hand. He raised his device with the other, pressed it into her chest.

"Master!" the Doctor yelled. "This is between us, just the two of us, _please_ \--"

Gene wrenched his hand from the cuffs.

_"Hey-la, hey, hello-ah..."_

"Hello, goodbye," the Master said.

Gene leapt, ran. He caught a sliver of the Master's face as he turned, yanked a fistful of his sleeve as he fired.

Light shot through Gene's hand. Pain exploded.

His shoulder hit the wall before he heard Annie yell, before one hand gripped the other and he felt blood, hot blood, all over, dripping, smearing. He yelled and didn't recognize his own voice, raised his left hand and saw a mangled mess, two ragged, fleshy stumps.

Annie shouted again. But all Gene saw was Sam, bloody Sam, skittered back, arse on the floor, eyes wide and made of horror.

"You..." he said.

Gene's nails dug into his wrist. He spoke, delirious, in agony.

"You told me to stop you." 

Sam shook his head. "You can't. You can't possibly..."

Heels clicked on the floor. The Master turned and Annie kicked him square in the gut, where he'd been bleeding the night before.

The Master yelled and doubled over. He clutched his stomach and Annie grabbed up his gadget from where he'd dropped it. She stepped back and pointed it at him, rage in her teary eyes.

"I know how to hurt you too," she said through teeth.

The Master wheezed. Annie shoved the device in her vest pocket and yanked her blouse sleeve clean off as she turned toward Gene. He registered the Master's puppet corpses as they collapsed to the ground.

"Just keep breathing." Annie pulled the fabric over Gene's palm and wrapped it tight where his last two fingers should have been. "Keep pressure, Guv, keep breathing..."

Her voice came from far away. The sharp edge of pain ebbed and flowed, and when the Master picked up his head, he fixed his eyes back on Gene. Like his lost gadget didn't matter. Like the jaws of a nightmare had opened before him, ready to swallow him whole.

"Sam," Gene said, hoarse. 

"Is that what you do?" the Doctor uttered.

Gene turned his head. Over Annie's shoulder, the Doctor stared at Gene from his chair, same look of stricken shock across his face. "Is that... God, is that what you _do?_ "

Annie tied off her makeshift bandage, tight. She pried Gene's hand from his wrist and pressed his palm over the wound, then let go and marched toward the Doctor. She pulled the gadget from her pocket and slapped it into his hand.

"Fix this," she said.

The Doctor blinked back at her. He curled his fist around the thing.

"I can't," he whispered. "You don't understand, I..."

The Master laughed.

Gene looked at him. He held one hand to his stomach, splayed the other on the floor, and yet he still laughed, a short, choked thing, loud and manic. Painful.

Gene's hand tightened on his searing wound. It hurt like a bastard, that empty spot, the ugly space where a part of him used to be.

"That's right," the Master breathed. "You can't do a bloody thing, you can't, you _can't._ "

He slapped his palm against the ground with the rhythm of his words. _You can't, you can't._

The restraints around the Doctor crackled and disappeared. He stood up and grimaced, device clutched in one hand. Annie grabbed his arm to steady him.

"Can't what," Gene muttered.

The Master raised his head, eyes wild, grinning teeth stained with blood. "Exactly. You don't even know, fucking idiot. _Idiot._ "

He laughed again. The Doctor tried to step forward, but Annie tugged him back.

The Doctor grit his teeth. "You have to tell me everything that happened that night, Master, this isn't funny--"

"It's hilarious." The Master rose to his feet, shaky. He pressed his palm to the top of a desk. "Appreciate the concern, old chum, but I can take care of myself."

"Like you took care of my officers?" Gene rasped. _Officers. Our officers._

Sam's face grinned. "You can blame yourself for that."

The white-hot pain at the edge of Gene's hand turned cold.

Then it slammed into him again. He sucked in a breath and shut his eyes. As his palm tightened against bony, blood-soaked cloth, it hit him like bricks -- nothing was there.

Nothing was there.

The Master took a step back. "Anyhoo. Been swell, you lot, but I'm afraid I've a diabolical plan to reconfigure."

The Doctor's hand tightened on the device. "You expect I'll let you go."

"I expect you'll have to." The Master pressed one hand to his injured stomach and raised the other in the air. He snapped his fingers.

Nichols' and Maxwell's bodies began to stumble to their feet. Annie let go of the Doctor's arm and snatched her pistol from the ground.

The Doctor grit his teeth. His eyes darted from the Master's device in his hand back to the Master. "How are you--"

"You'll work it out." Nichols and Maxwell shambled toward them as the Master backed away. "Right after I blow this place to hell."

A shot cracked through the air -- Maxwell stumbled. Gene turned to see Annie standing rigid, pistol pointed at the Master.

The Master glanced where she'd hit his minion, just past him, then grinned. "You don't have the nerve."

Annie tilted her head, tears wet on her cheeks. "Don't I, sir?"

The Master's grin faltered.

The Doctor grasped Annie's shoulder. "He won't," he hissed. "He can't. He'd create a paradox -- he'd die, if he killed us all."

"Doesn't apply to the girl." The Master cocked his head. "Or you, for that matter."

Cold air hit Gene again. It was impossible to miss, who they weren't talking about, who they weren't even looking at, the both of them.

"What's going on?" Gene said. 

The Master glanced at him. "I'm destroying you. Ciao."

White light shot out of the floor, between concrete cracks, specks of graphite dust. Gene staggered back as the Doctor yelled something over the sudden roar, something about _Annie_ and _take my hand._

Gene felt nails dig into his shoulder, then turbulence, and a vacuum, awful and sick. Air left his lungs. His hand throbbed with pain and heat.

Then his shoulder hit gravel. He tumbled, once, twice, the world a dizzying whorl of black and grey. He stopped on his back and gasped in breaths, an overcast sky above him.

He wrenched himself to his feet. Nearby, the Doctor's lanky form was sprawled out on the ground while Annie struggled to her hands and knees. Gene's eyes adjusted to the light, and -- roof, they were on a rooftop. No idea how, or why. Didn't bloody care--

A boom cracked and sizzled through the air.

Gene turned, slow. Annie stood upright, staring off at some unknown point, her knees skinned and bloody, one shoulder bare. She pressed a hand to her mouth.

Gene followed her gaze. In the distance, in his skyline, under the haze of clouds and the city that bore them, a grey concrete building stood firm and familiar, robust in its rain-stained exterior, its ugly grey walls.

Looking at it, you could almost forget the world had gone upside down.

Until it groaned. Until it cracked and shattered, like brittle bone. Breaking to pieces and rebar chunks, as dust and smoke billowed into the sky.

For a second, Gene didn't feel it.

Didn't feel the sound that came up his throat, his fist as it slammed into the ground. Didn't talk, didn't breathe past the hole in his chest, the jagged edges that caught on his ribs, that pulled him down to his knees.

Didn't feel until an arm held him back and a voice pierced the flood -- "They're okay, they moved back. _Guv_."

Gene looked at Annie, her face marred with scratches and grit. Her fingers dug into his shoulder.

"Ray told them the perimeter was too close, had them move back after you left -- everyone's safe, Guv. It's okay."

Gene breathed in. He shoved her away and turned his head, for a second just tasting the air.

Between his dry tongue and his aching gums, he got out, "No it's not."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the year 2011, an overly-ambitious but very slow-writing college student decided she wanted to do a crossover between two beloved TV series, based on an actor they held in common, as well as myriad delicious themes and motifs. This kind of fic had been done before, she knew, and spectacularly in some cases (I'd like to point you all to Aria's "[Life on Earth](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13361)" -- good _lord_ ), but this college student was very particular, and greedy.
> 
> So onto this project she ventured.
> 
> In the time since beginning this thing, I have moved twice, held three different jobs, and sustained no less than two semi-severe injuries due to running around my home in excitement over it. (No, really. A sprained ankle and a bruise bigger than my splayed-out hand.) I have literally bled for this project (at least internally), and definitely shed sweat and tears besides. It is the single longest piece of anything that I have ever written, and continues to beckon me with new ideas as I lie in bed at night.
> 
> Given its hold on me, I decided to post this fic in its unfinished state in order to focus on career-important projects instead. I have every intention of finishing it once I have those other projects out of the way, and in the meantime I can only hope that you, the dedicated fans of ten-years-ago characters, have enjoyed reading it.
> 
> **tl;dr:** I can't tell you how important this fanfiction is to me or what a big effort it is to finally let go of a portion of it after obsessing and ~~over~~ -rewriting details these past few years. It's my joy, my baby, my magnum opus, and -- whoops, there I go running around my apartment again. 8)
> 
> Thank you so much for giving this thing a whirl. I sincerely hope you like it so far!
> 
> P.S. Way back, when I came up with the name "Manchester Mangler," I realized I should probably double-check that the name didn't already exist. So I googled it and found the top result to be a Doctor Who Wiki article. Incredible.


End file.
